Curated by producer Rick Rubin, who needs no introduction, Festival of the Sun does not confine itself conventional norms. In its June 20-21 2026 edition, the festival took place across four villages in Tuscany’s Val d’Elsa – Colle di Val d’Elsa, Casole d’Elsa, Monteriggioni and Mensano – turning the whole valley into a stage. Performances, conversations and artistic moments took place in settings ranging from open hillsides and village piazzas to a cathedral crypt, with many details revealed only shortly before they happened. It is a festival built on discovery and spontaneity rather than a published lineup, drawing an audience of music lovers, artists and creatives from around the world alongside the local community.
K-array served as technical sponsor for audio across the event, supplying bespoke audio systems for the main squares, gardens, an open-air theatre, a cathedral crypt and a private castle performance. Simultaneously, the organisation provided on-site personnel to configure, tune and support the systems throughout the weekend.
K-array’s involvement in Festival of the Sun grew out of a personal connection. Rick Rubin first heard K-array systems through Kanye West’s Sunday Service, where they had been selected for early private performances in Calabasas and went on to accompany the choir through several appearances. Rubin has described hearing the system at the Easter Sunday Service at Coachella in 2019 as pure magic, and in his words, this was the best he had ever heard Kanye sound.
That experience led to a direct relationship with K-array, initially managed by business developer Daniel Strasserra. This unfolded through a series of meetings, including a visit by Rubin to K-array’s headquarters in Florence. He subsequently chose K-array to provide sound for several spaces at his home in Tuscany.
When he created the first Festival of the Sun in Casole d’Elsa in 2024, he brought K-array in as technical sponsor, supplying audio for the main square and the church. That first collaboration also connected K-array directly with the production team behind the festival, including Fiammetta Cicogna of Sun San Production and production coordinator Noemi Di Nunzio, alongside Woodworm, who manage key aspects of the festival’s technical production. The 2026 edition was the continuation of a relationship built organically over several years.
K-array was brought in several months ahead of the festival, but the brief was markedly different to that of a conventional live event. Planning begins well in advance, while the program itself stays deliberately fluid and can continue to evolve until close to the performances themselves. Rick Rubin tends to follow the energy he senses in artists, ideas and locations, so a performance may take shape, move or change format as the festival develops. Surprise is not treated as a complication to be designed around. Instead, it is one of the festival’s essential ingredients.
K-array’s task therefore was less about designing one fixed system around a finalized program. Instead, it was about creating the technical conditions for that freedom to remain possible through a broad and versatile inventory that could be deployed or reconfigured quickly, wherever a performance was ultimately chosen to happen. The compactness and flexibility of K-array’s systems proved essential here, with a relatively small technical footprint supporting everything from intimate talks and acoustic sets to high-energy concerts in large open-air spaces.
Rather than imposing one standard festival configuration across every venue, K-array treated each location as a distinct acoustic environment, while working from a common modular inventory that could be transported, installed and adapted rapidly as the program evolved.
For talks and more intimate performances, the team used Pinnacle column systems in streamlined configurations, deployed in the church gardens in Monteriggioni, beneath a tree in Mensano, in the open-air theatre in Casole d’Elsa, in the crypt of the cathedral in Colle di Val d’Elsa, and for a public talk by Jack Dorsey. In these settings, intelligibility, even coverage and a minimal physical presence mattered more than raw output. This was a critical consideration in villages where the historic fabric of the buildings could not be disrupted.
The larger outdoor performances called for a different approach. In Monteriggioni’s main square, the system comprised two Dragon-KXT12 loudspeakers with two Thunder-KS4 subwoofers, driven by the Kommander amplifier line, with KGEAR GT12 units handling stage monitoring for performances by Jovanotti and Joep Beving.
In Piazza del Duomo in Colle di Val d’Elsa, the main PA used two KH7 elements vertically stacked on each side, with four KS7P subwoofers per side arranged in a cardioid configuration to control rearward energy and to limit low-frequency spill toward the stage and surrounding architecture. The system was driven by Kommander line power amps, with Mastiff-KM112P and KGEAR GT12 units used for stage monitoring.
At the castle event, the deployment used one KXT18P and two KS3 subwoofers per side. Across every location, the same principle applied. Match the system to the room, not the room to the system.
“Festival of the Sun is, in many ways, a direct expression of our own guiding philosophy – Beyond Sound, Towards Meaning,” says Andrea Torelli, marketing director at K-array. “As a brand, we put music and cultural expression at the heart of everything we do, and few projects put that vision to the test as thoroughly as this one. Supporting an event built on spontaneity, historic settings and constant change was not simply a technical exercise for K-array. It was an opportunity to contribute to a meaningful artistic experience that brings people together through music. It demonstrated that sound quality and cultural sensitivity do not have to be traded off against each other.”
Working across hillsides, piazzas, gardens and a cathedral crypt asked K-array’s systems to disappear into the architecture as readily as they filled it with sound, protecting the character of centuries-old spaces while still delivering the clarity that a Rick Rubin-curated performance demands. That balance, more than any single deployment, is what the project revealed about K-array’s own products and about the values behind them.
The K-array on-site technical team included Paolo Capponi, Matteo Barbaro and Andrei Valentini, supporting deployment, system configuration, tuning and troubleshooting across all locations for the duration of the festival, working alongside local production and technical crews to keep pace with a program that continued to change until close to showtime.
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