Inside a geodesic dome erected in the museum’s courtyard and filled to capacity, 500 listeners craned their necks for a view of Mr. Jaar, who sat behind his laptop, the screen’s glow illuminating his blue eyes. Warm clouds of crackly hiss issued from obelisklike speakers, building gradually over 15- to 20-minute cycles from washes of ambient noise into roiling, steamy house music, then dissipating back into an ethereal burble.
Above Mr. Jaar black-and-white video images of skeletal trees and Gothic church spires crawled across the dome’s ceiling. He shifted occasionally from the laptop to an array of keyboards and a turntable, creating textures and percussion from sampled records. As the hours melted away, he was joined in collaboration by a saxophonist, a female vocalist and an interpretive dancer.
“From Scratch,” the inaugural performance in MoMA PS1’s new Sunday Sessions series, seemed like a techno take on a 1960s “Happening.”
“I’ve had a dream forever of making music live for people, to actually improvise from scratch, and to do it for a long time, so that people get to see the whole creative process,” Mr. Jaar said later. “I want them to hear how sampling actually works.”
Mr. Jaar may have attempted to present the eureka moment of artistic conception, but it wound up even more spontaneous than he had planned. His hectic schedule the previous two months — he used his winter break from studying comparative literature at Brown to play concerts throughout South America and Europe — prevented him from listening to the vinyl albums he’d bought in São Paulo, Brazil, until he reached for them onstage.
“When I took the records out,” he said, “I had no clue if this was going to be anything I could sample in the first place. It was ‘From Scratch’ in such a crazy way.”
It’s a measure of Mr. Jaar’s preternatural self-confidence that he’s willing to walk such a delicate high wire, but negotiating the divide between the headphone experience and the dance floor is at the root of his work. Electronic music may have exploded into the American mainstream in 2011 — witness the Grammy night glowstick-assault by Skrillex, Deadmau5, and David Guetta — but Mr. Jaar’s music couldn’t be further from those performers.
Where the music of, say, Skrillex, flits from one cathartic explosion to the next, Mr. Jaar offers a melancholic, lugubrious throb that he once jokingly termed “blue-wave,” evoking Erik Satie or Leonard Cohen as much as deep house. Elements of Ethiopian jazz, hip-hop and ambient piano create a sultry, smoky vibe, with Mr. Jaar’s deep voice (alternating among English, Spanish and French lyrics) bobbing in and out of the mix. His down-tempo beats are intended to cause what he has called “rhythmic anguish,” a more meditative and contemplative state, though they still retain an insinuating groove.
Only recently turned 22, Mr. Jaar has been releasing 12-inch EPs since he was 17 and steadily building an international reputation as both a solo performer and the leader of a live band; a poll on the electronic music Web site Resident Advisor named him 2011’s top live act. His 2011 debut album “Space Is Only Noise” sold 25,000 copies worldwide and appeared on many year-end “best-of” lists.
For a project coming out next month he’s even designed his own music player: the Prism, a minimalist cube with two headphone jacks, which he envisions as both a sculptural object and a new way to distribute digital music, the kind of lofty ambitions that were nurtured when he was growing up in SoHo and Santiago as the son of the Chilean conceptual artist Alfredo Jaar.
