Rick Rubin’s Secret Tuscany Music Festival Had Arcade Fire Members, Rhye, Jack Dorsey, & More
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Rick Rubin held a secret music festival in Tuscany for the summer solstice. As Variety reports, the event, called Festival Of The Sun, took place in Casole d’Elsa, a medieval village in the Sienese countryside where Rubin purchased a farm in 2019.
Performers included Arcade Fire’s Win Butler and Régine Chassange, James Blake, Gossip, Rhye, the Italian pop-rap artist Jovanotti, DJ Cosmo Gonik, London singer/cellist Lucinda Chua, Finnish model and musician Julia Johansen, Armenian composer and pianist Marie Awadis, and Kirtan artist Krishna Das, known as the “rock star” of yoga. Also on hand at the fest were Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, who gave a talk called “Tech And Freedom,” and director Andrew Dominik, who screened his Nick Cave documentary This Much I Know To Be True.
About 150 guests were invited to attend the performances in the church where most of the festival took place, some events were held outdoors and were free for the public. Per Variety, the guests in attendance included Italian celebrities like Måneskin’s Thomas Raggi and Ethan Torchio, rapper Ghali, and actors Riccardo Scamarcio and Benedetta Porcaroli.
About that lineup: Every person has to draw their own conclusions about how to engage with Arcade Fire and Rhye’s music following the misconduct allegations against Butler and Mike Milosh, but putting them together at one small, carefully curated event like this is certainly a choice.
