Extracellular: Dolly Dolly / Sophie Sleigh Johnson / Secluded Bronte (live at the The Rising Sun Arts Centre)

Reading
28 February 2026

Celebrating Buried Treasure’s latest Extracellular comp (which is going to get its own well deserved write up soon, I promise), label boss Alan Gubby invited a few of its featured artists to perform at a tiny arts centre just off the London Road in Reading, Berkshire.

Knowing the calibre of the label’s eclectic radar and having sampled many previous happenings this was definitely an opportunity not to be missed — even though the sat nav had other ideas! (I swear that thing’s haunted).

I’ve loved the poetic magic of Dolly Dolly for some time now (the label birthday a few years ago was my introduction), and tonight was an absolute joy. After announcing the profound satisfaction of having a good shit, he offered up a Kafka-eseque tale of a dog walk fall in the park gone awry.

Riding a linguistic twist of wry observation and comedic cheek, you were carried away on the believability of what you were being told, as the inconvenience of a twig poking out from the wound was slowly transforming him into a tree. A poignantly pronged tale, melancholically salted, his words leaping everywhere with salacious sizzle.

Spinning so many plates, Sophie Sleigh Johnson’s feedback-scarred (intentional or not) wordplay was something else. Scuzzed up in sonic debris, the droning tones she was plying added an eerie aura / gravitas to what was being spoken. A disorientating schism of pre-recorded news reports and dictaphone dialogue of paranormal happenings that you were thrown into, which she overlayed with repeated phrases then circulated in recurring embellishments, looped into and distorted from differing microphoned sources.

Her words portal-pulling like punctuated periscopes, a hooked narrative of stuttering consonants, overtaken by a rub of static, the blurred edges of which jig-sawed your mind as she occasionally answered the telephone to a switchboard from the past. A psychic soup of leaky otherness to my closed eyes, and a perfect introduction to the signed Code:Damp book I bought on the night.

Secluded Bronte are a male threesome who introduced their set nonchalantly wandering around the hall, with Adam Bohman blowing a teapot, Jonathan Bohman flapping the air with an empty briefcase and Richard Thomas sweeping the floor to grumbled mutterings before sitting down and despatching their musical nous.

A Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band-like skewer of improv richness, full of sarcastic gold. A ram-shackled spontaneity of interlocking rhythmics that got you itchy in the feet and hips, comprising guitar, keys and the exotic rub of Adam’s found-sound laboratory he’d filled a whole table with. Ridiculously fluid, that plumby seriousness certainly knifed the comedic potential that little bit deeper; there was even a bit of coconut shell horsey percussion that should have felt frankly naff, but here creatively sparkled.

The subject matter giving out a squished-up dream-like surreality throughout, fresh perspectives that had me laughing out loud covering time-travelling outlaws, parma violet / fighter pilot crash landings and weird disputes with Hackney Council. Really hoping an album’s worth of this chaos will materialise sometime soon.

Having started the night’s proceedings, it was only fitting that Dolly Dolly should end them. The absurd brilliance of his “Death Sausage” (Alan later exclaiming “should have been on the comp”) morphing in a reading of priceless anecdotes from his ‘departed’ gran’s birthday book that had to be heard to believed, all ending on an antimacassar high of powerful prose that pinched and prised, fired up your cranium like the Blackpool Illuminations. A celebration of the everyday writ magical.

What a night…

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-