226. Exit North
Union Chapel
28 April 2025
I have written before of the fact that certain artists still feel like huge gaps in my gig-history, particularly the remaining component members of Japan. While this was partially satiated by seeing Richard Barbieri, Japan’s keyboard player, including meeting him in a baguette aisle, there remain large Sylvian and Jansen shaped holes in the ledger. However, one of those holes was about to be filled: Exit North, the Scandinavian art-pop collective featuring none other than Steve Jansen, brother of David Sylvian, timekeeper of Japan, were playing at the Union Chapel.
It was meant to be me and my oldest mate, my co-conspirator in all things Japan, but fate, and a scheduling clash of tragic proportions, intervened. So, I went alone, armed only with a reverent heart, a ticket, and the faint hope that this might finally close another loop for me on our shared musical mythos.
Union Chapel was, as ever, perfect, all gothic arches and votive candles. The pews filled with predominantly Japan devotees, including, sat next to me, two delightful Japanese ladies who had travelled all the way over from Tokyo to see him. We chatted, which was slightly difficult as they barely spoke a word of English, but managed with the fallback to hand gestures.
Exit North is a band that embraces Scandinavian minimalism to extreme proportions. There are only two of them and one of them is a drummer. Front and centre, Thomas Feiner, the Swedish vocalist, dressed in funereal black with one eye smudged in dark kohl, looked less like a singer and more like a tortured avante-garde painter dragged reluctantly into the light.
Feiner’s voice was extraordinary: low, sonorous, it curled through the air, mournful yet magnetic, you didn’t just listen to him; you were drawn into his orbit. Behind him, Jansen was the still centre of the storm, composed, immaculate, a master craftsman at work. Watching him play was like seeing Richard Barbieri all over again: that same quiet authority, the same sense that he was sculpting sound rather than merely making it. His drumming wasn’t about rhythm; it was about architecture, shaping silence and resonance into something tangible. The connection to Japan was unmistakable, perhaps more so than Barbieri’s concert, but this was something else entirely, a more introspective, spectral evolution of that legacy.
The set drew heavily from the band’s two albums, Book of Romance and Dust and Anyway, Still, and the music was just as the titles suggest, cinematic, slow-burning, and heartbreakingly beautiful. Tracks like “Lessons in Doubt” and “Your Story Mine” unfolded like lost film scores, all minor keys and infinite patience. At times, it felt like the air itself was vibrating with melancholy.
Feiner stalked the stage: part prophet, part undertaker, part avant-garde mime. And yet, it worked. You couldn’t look away. When he sang, he seemed to pour the words directly from some deep, hidden place that most of us spend our lives avoiding.
As I sat there, halfway through “Gold in the Air”, I realised what was happening. This was continuation: Barbieri, Jansen, Sylvian, these weren’t names from the past; they were coordinates on a map that was still being drawn. Exit North weren’t playing to the memory of Japan, they were building on it, carefully, quietly, magnificently.
When the final notes drifted off into the rafters, there was a long silence before anyone dared to clap. And when they did, it was heartfelt, grateful, almost devotional.