PERFORMANCE artist Lee Ashcroft likes a project. At the moment he’s got five on the go.

There’s the Nearly, an audio-visual electro-acid music act; Digital Vomit, a record label he established in America; Za Ginipiggu, an experimental music project aiming to remove the composer from the music-making process; and Dead Air Recordings, a record label and live promotions company, which specialises in releasing new music on obsolete audio formats.

His most recent incarnation is the Rev Dr Ian Prolix, which has seen Lee move into the world of performance poetry.

Lee says: “I’m always looking for things that interest me and this came about when I discovered the Church of the Sub Genius.

“The whole thing is a satire on the New Age religion thing, but for $30 you can be indoctrinated.

“You get to choose a new name because your real name is your conspiracy name and I can also legally perform marriages.”

The second thing was reading about Colchester Arts Centre’s Poetry Slam, which Lee thought was an ideal place to try out his new persona.

He adds: “I had this idea with a turntable and devised a bit of prose and that was it.

“To be honest, I didn’t think people would like it as much as they did, so when I made the final of the competition I hadn’t really prepared anything. I never set out to be a poet or a comedian, but I’ve stuck with it because people seem to like it.”

Born In Earls Colne, and now living in Kelvedon, Colchester gig-goers’ first experience of Lee’s delightful off-kilter musical leanings was with Mixomatosis, a pop music mash-up act, which in Lee’s own words “started as a quest for popularity and ended as a performance art shambles”.

Lee says: “I never really got into music until I was 14 and even then the Chemical Brothers was my only nod to that kind of thing. Then I got a copy of Come to Daddy by Aphex Twin, which opened a whole new world to me.”

That, and a show called MTV Mash-Up, which as the name suggests played mash-ups, a track that is made-up of two previously recorded songs to make a new piece of music.

Lee’s very own Aphex/MTV mash-up resulted in Mixomatosis, which got its first proper airing at the Colchester Arts Centre supporting fellow musical experimentalists VVM and Clippty Clop.

That was back in 2004, since when Mixomatosis supported Client, Sarah Blackwood from Dubstar’s electro band, in London, been played twice by Eddy Temple-Morris on his XFM the Remix show and hosted a live two-hour show on Resonance FM with diva, performance artist and gay icon Holestar.

But perhaps his greatest achievement was having Sara Cox hum one of his mash ups on Radio One, which Lee then re-mixed in a collaboration with Extreme Noise Terror's Dean Jones. “It was just too tempting not to put her back on the original mash up,” he smiles.

Under Dead Air Experiments, Lee’s curated a number of live shows including ones at gaming centre Megazone, in Rayleigh, and on board TS Colne Light Ship in the Hythe.

To find out more about Lee’s work go to www.deadairrecordings.

com or www.facebook.com/the nearly