Robust Worlds was born out of Chris Rose's ambition to, as he puts it, "work on band stuff all the time." As a one-man show, Robust Worlds certainly can keep Rose busy. After all, he's doing all the singing, writing all the parts, and manning it all on stage—no small feat, and certainly not an easy show to pull off live. "Because I wanted Robust Worlds to be a live act so I could tour, I wanted to be able to control and play everything. The songs needed to sound good as just guitar and vocals, and then when all the rest was added, they needed to be interesting and engaging live," explained Rose.

MYSPACE  ::  FACEBOOK

Indeed, they are. Robust Worlds is still in its early stages—the MySpace page is blank, the Facebook page is sparse, no recordings are yet available—but the experience Rose gained from Vampire Hands is obvious to anyone who's caught him live. He works furiously on guitar and synths with the same experimental, psychedelic sound that was so key to Vampire Hands, but in Robust Worlds, Rose takes it further. It comes off as a warped, sometimes dissonant, precocious space lullaby, with Rose alternating his pitches and playing with dubstep. He calls this sound "futurist folk-rock," which, for a made-up genre, is surprisingly accurate. "I wanted a description that I could deal with that would be mildly informative about the music," he explained. "At first it really helped me to think of my songs as 'folk songs plus,' so it would be like, 'Oh, this isn't space at all, it's a busy folk song.'" [City Pages, October 2011]