Isle of Summer Festival

The S-Bahn ride east toward Riem ends not at a lakeshore but at Landshamer Straße 11, where the Olympische Reitanlage still looks like what it is: an Olympic equestrian complex with stands built for horses and judges, not for a nightclub queue. From eleven in the morning until ten at night, that historic ground — the same wider Riem site that has also hosted Greenfields — becomes the large June appointment of the Isle of Summer series. Dust, open sky and the width of a racecourse tell you immediately this is not Praterinsel and not a beach afterparty. It is a full outdoor day of house and techno on Munich’s eastern edge.

Isle of Summer Festival is the date that needs the most land. Permanent Entertainment GmbH has run the series since 2010, first on Praterinsel with as many as four dates a year, later settling into three seasonal appointments. This June day is the one that left the intimate island behind for a field. It is not the April Opening and not the August Beach beside the Olympic rowing course; it is the afternoon when the crowd is wide enough that walking between bars, stages and shade becomes part of the choreography.

The company works from Reichenbachstraße 33 in the Glockenbachviertel, with Bastian and Sebastian Schleich behind a project the organiser himself called a ninth season in 2018 — a useful confirmation that the start sits in 2010. Continuity matters because the audience followed the venue moves rather than treating each address as a new brand: Praterinsel, Optimolwerke (closed in 2018), Riem, Oberschleißheim. At the Reitanlage the Festival inherits that loyalty and translates it into scale: the same two genres, a different geography, a different kind of weather exposure from late morning to evening.

The venue writes the story. Olympic equestrian infrastructure carries the memory of the Games and of a fairground belt east of the city. Walking Landshamer Straße you see halls, fences and a suburban horizon that the Isar chestnut island never offered. Sharing historic ground with Greenfields does not turn this into an indie camping weekend; it only shows that Riem already knows how a summer enclosure works. House and techno have more air here, and more distance between bodies, than they did on a central island.

Programming makes more sense if you picture a daytime field rather than a 4 a.m. club. Fritz Kalkbrenner has supplied sung, melodic house that can fill open ground without waiting for darkness; DJ Koze has brought the elegant oddness that keeps a June afternoon from becoming a peak-only set; Lexy & K-Paul recall the Berlin bridge between electronic pop and the floor; Guy Gerber holds the long hypnotic groove that needs hours of sun to unfold. Those names are not decoration. They explain how a racecourse date can hold a mixed crowd — club regulars and people who came to spend the day — without inventing a third genre beside house and techno.

A more radio-familiar layer fits the scale as well. Robin Schulz and Bakermat, on bills for this appointment, stand for house a large city recognises on first listen: travelling melodies, drops that do not demand techno militancy. On a hippodrome site that is not a tourist concession; it is how an eleven-to-ten day avoids splitting into tribes. Whoever enters at noon and whoever arrives mid-afternoon still shares a rhythmic language, even if each later drifts toward the drier or the more sung side of the programme.

The crowd experience is a full outdoor day under June sun on a field that offers no lake breeze. You walk more than on Praterinsel: the equestrian layout forces routes between zones, shade hunts beside stands or halls, and a decision about eating on site or arriving already stocked. There is no beach after and no run until one in the morning: at ten the site goes dark and Munich-Riem is a neighbourhood again. That clock defines the character. Arrive early if you want the whole curve from midday warm-up to late-afternoon peak. Dust, heat and the absence of water as landscape — unlike Oberschleißheim — show up in clothing and in how often people pause.

A season ticket for the series already treats this day as the centre of gravity: not the familiar April start, not the close beside the water. Permanent Entertainment holds the three dates as an arc, and the Riem Festival is the span where the community looks widest. It should not be confused with same-name events on the Baltic coast around Rügen or Binz: the island in the title is a Bavarian summer figure of speech, not a northern spa. One day, house and techno, east of Munich, on ground designed for horses and, for those June hours, lent to another kind of race.

What remains after the rigs go quiet on Landshamer Straße is neither a beach hangover nor the secret of an urban island. It is the feeling of having occupied an Olympic racecourse for eleven hours and of having measured the series by its widest appointment. Isle of Summer Festival exists so that Munich community has a field, not only a jetty or a chestnut tree, and so that June house and techno can be heard at the scale Riem allows and Praterinsel, however beautiful, could no longer give.