The Finnish musician Tuomas Holopainen obviously loves not only the night, but also the dawn: On the one hand his symphonic metal band Nightwish is on tour again and has a career retrospective in his luggage with the double album "Decades". On the other hand, the keyboarder, together with his wife, folk singer Johanna Kurkela, and Nightwish bagpipe player Troy Donockley, founded the new band Auri and released a debut album.
Mythological themes have always been an integral part of Nightwish. The same applies to Tuomas Holopainen's new trio, which was formed during a long creative break of the band: The name Auri, derived from Aurora, the Latin expression for dawn, comes from a creature from Patrick Rothfuss's fantasy trilogy "The Royal Murderer Chronicle". For Holopainen, the Ethnopop project proved to be a means of regenerating his creative resources. In an interview he and his wife Johanna Kurkela tell how they finally put an old musical dream into action.
