◆ Open-air festival producers · Kanchen Ridge, 2,900 m
We build music festivals on ridgelines, tidelines, dunes and forest clearings — and design the sky that closes them. Pick a world. The night changes.
Click anywhere in the sky to launch. · 0 shells up tonight
01 / WORLDS
We do not build the same festival four times and move it around. Each of these is a different problem: what the ground can carry, what the wind does after dark, where the sun goes down and what you can safely put in the sky above it. Choose one and the whole page goes there.
02 / THE COMPOSER
Three decisions make a festival feel like somewhere: where it is, when it peaks and how it ends. Turn the dials and the sky above rebuilds itself — this is the same conversation we have on a site visit, only faster and without the mud.
Site
Hour
Finale
Everything you choose here is a real constraint somewhere else: a drone show needs a 400 m exclusion zone, sky lanterns are illegal within 5 km of an airfield, and pyro over water needs a boat and a coastguard notice.
The night you would get
—
—
0
Festivals built off-grid
0
Ground surveyed and cleared
0
Shells fired, none over a crowd
Nil
Sites left worse than we found
03 / SELECTED WORK
Four we are willing to be judged on. Each had an afternoon where the weather, the permit or the road said no.
Everything came up the last four kilometres on mules and a winch. The stage faced east so the last set ended into sunrise, and the finale was 200 drones because you cannot put pyro over a dry alpine meadow in March.
Built on the hard sand at low water, struck before the tide returned at 04:40. Shells were fired from two barges 300 m out, so the entire finale arrived twice — once in the sky and once in the water.
A dune bowl works like a natural amphitheatre and eats low end for breakfast. We flew the PA off scaffold towers sunk in sand plates, and the whole programme was timed so the headline started as the shadows joined up.
A working coffee estate with a bat roost two ridges over, so nothing loud after midnight and nothing explosive at all. The finale was lantern-lit and silent, and it is still the best ending we have made.
04 / RUN OF SHOW
Indoors, the building does half the work. Outdoors there is no building, so the day starts earlier and ends later than anyone expects. Scroll it — the marker keeps time with you.
05:30
Ground crew walk the whole footprint before anything is unloaded: soft patches, ant hills, a drainage line nobody drew on the plan. The site plan changes on this walk almost every time.
Site manager · ground crew · safety officer
07:00
Roads first. Generators sited downwind and far enough out that the audience never hears them, fuel bunded, water bowsers in before the trucks chew the access up.
Infrastructure crew · fuel contractor
11:00
The roof goes up with an anemometer on it and a written wind plan: reduce at 45 km/h, drop banners at 60, evacuate the deck at 80. Nobody argues with the number on the day because it was agreed weeks before.
Rigging crew · structural engineer
15:00
No walls means no reflections and no help. We tune for the far field and then walk the noise-sensitive boundary with a meter, because the neighbours decide whether we are welcome back.
System tech · noise consultant
16:30
Mortars sunk, angles set away from the crowd and the treeline, firing box tested twice. The zone is walked, taped and handed to security with a printed map, not a description.
Pyro lead · licensed operator · security
17:45
Golden hour is the first thing the audience sees, so the site has to be finished before it — no trucks, no tape, no crew in hi-vis on the desire lines.
Front of house · gate crew · box office
20:10
Programmed to the minute the sun goes behind the ridge. It is the one cue in the day that cannot move, and every other set time is built backwards from it.
Show caller · stage manager
23:40
Two minutes of sky, fired to timecode off the last track. Wind is checked at T-30 and T-5, and there is a rehearsed version with no pyro at all in case the answer is no.
Pyro lead · show caller · FOH
03:00
Everything out, ground reinstated, a line-abreast litter walk at first light with the site owner. We photograph the field empty and send it with the invoice.
Whole crew · site owner
05 / CAPABILITY
A field is not a venue. Everything a building would have given you — power, water, roads, toilets, a roof, a legal occupancy figure — arrives on a truck and leaves on one.
| Department | What we bring | Scales to | Lead time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ground | Site survey · trackway · sand and bog plates · reinstatement bond | 40 acres | 60 days |
| Power | Silenced generators to 500 kVA · bunded fuel · solar and battery hybrid on quiet sites | Fully off-grid | 30 days |
| Stage | Ground-support roof to 15×12 m · wind plan · engineer sign-off | 12,000 cap | 45 days |
| Sound | Line array for open air · delay towers · boundary noise monitoring | 1.2 km throw | 21 days |
| Sky | Pyro to 150 mm · 400-drone swarm · lantern releases where legal | 3-minute finale | 90 days |
| People | Medical · crowd modelling · camping · water · welfare · leave-no-trace crew | Included, always | 60 days |
06 / START A SITE
Enough to shape a first pass. The panel updates as you type — the same arithmetic we do on the phone, and a range rather than a quote.