VAST

When Jon Crosby’s major-label debut, Visual Audio Sensory Theater, was released in 1998, it received a great deal of airplay. Fortunately for Crosby, that was a year when radio stations were scrambling to find something, anything, that might be a hit. The album’s mix of ambience and hard-edged guitar sketches didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but it did garner a cult following. At times, Crosby’s voice tends to sound a bit generic in an uninspired, ’90s-alterna-rock sort of way. Whatever he lacks in vocal ability, however, Crosby makes up for in sheer artistic ambition. And his live performances — perhaps in an attempt to live up to his project’s lofty moniker — are bona fide multimedia spectacles.