When Nightwish’s planned world tour was postponed, Tuomas Holopainen and Troy Donockley used their free time to work on the second Auri album. On II – Those We Don’t Speak Of, the trio – completed by Johanna Kurkela – take listeners on an unexpected journey through a magical dreamworld. Bandleader Holopainen tells Prog how they transformed their scrapped plans into something truly wonderful.

Words: Dannii Leivers

Bringing magic to the table, L-R: Troy Donockley, Johanna Kurkela and Tuomas Holopainen.

Images: Mikko Linnavuori

A few years ago, Auri multi-instrumentalist, Troy Donockley, was driving through the early morning mists when inspiration hit him. He was out in the wilds of rural North Yorkshire, passing over a bridge when he noticed a field below, flooded with water, still as glass and shrouded in heavy fog. Abandoning his car, he headed into the haze.

“I turned around to look at the bridge and both it and the car had disappeared into the fog,” he would tell Prog over email few days after today’s interview. “I got the uncanny feeling that I was on the Earth millions of years ago, the beginning, after some primeval flood; the 21st century had gone.”

The mysterious encounter led him to write Light And Flood, the cinematic, seven-minute centrepiece of Auri’s second album, II – Those We Don’t Speak Of. “He felt completely mesmerised by it,” Donockley’s bandmate and keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen explains further today. “He tried to capture that moment in that song.”