Once a one-man project of founder Jon Crosby, VAST. has become a full-fledged band with the addition of guitarist Justin Cotter, drummer Steve Clark and bassist Thomas Froggatt.

The industrial/ambient hybrid will kick off the winter road trip in Minneapolis November 24, and tentatively winds down in Fresno, Calif., December 22.

A native of Fortuna – a tiny logging town on California’s north coast – Crosby formed the outfit at age 17 with the help of a bass player, a drum machine and lots of magnetic tape.

After a demo sparked a record company bidding war, Crosby released his debut in 1998. For VAST’s second release, he made the transition to working with a full band on the new album, Music For People.

He’s cool with it.

“It’s weird,” Crosby told Pollstar. “A lot of people start out as a band and end up going solo. This is reversed. I still wrote everything on the second record and I produced it, so I almost had more to do with it.

“What matters is that the record and the show are the best they can be, and I don’t care if it’s written by all of us or if it’s only written by me. I’m not trying to impress anyone. It was never my intention for VAST to be a solo project. I just couldn’t find musicians that were on the same page as me.”

Now that he has, the band has spent much of the year on the road gaining fans and getting noticed, touring with acts such as Queens of the Stone Age and Unified Theory.