There’s a funny line in “The Big Chill,” of all things, that applies directly to David Torn. At one point, William Hurt is watching a late-night creature feature and remarks, in a smart-aleck aside, that “It’s art, you just have to let it wash over you.”

Mr. Torn’s giddy onslaught Tuesday at Joe’s Pub begs for just such an appraisal, but not in a jivey way. The gizmo-loving guitar hero is a rare enough sight on a New York City stage to explain the standing-room only house, though lately he’s been popping up in odd corners, like Park Slope’s low-key Tea Lounge, with his longtime sidekick, the alto saxophonist Tim Berne. It was with Mr. Berne and his frequent bandmates —keyboardist Craig Taborn and drummer Tom Rainey — that Mr. Torn performed at Joe’s, surveying the group concept behind his new album, “prezens” (ECM).

Mr. Torn’s quartet is committed to a dark, eruptive, oceanic sound in which overlapping bursts and fragments of rhythm, melody, and harmony sometimes crash violently against one another before ebbing into a translucent stillness. On the new album, recorded two years ago in Mr. Torn’s Hudson River Valley studio and radically “magicked” by the guitarist in post-production, the effect is properly hallucinatory, but often more “chill.” Mr. Torn, whose last ECM disc was 1987’s “Clouds About Mercury,” is a pioneer in sculpting ambient textures with guitars and electronics, using powerful rock dynamics fused to a slippery jazz flow. He digs that sound out from way in, the same kind of hermetic studio wizardry that Miles Davis and Teo Macero masterminded on the trumpeter’s classic electric albums of the late 1960s and early ’70s.

Onstage, however, the approach guarantees a head rush. On Tuesday, Mr. Torn alternated between two guitars and a blinking bank of electronics that looped and distorted snatches of music that had just been played, creating a mutant commentary on the group’s basement space-lab chemistry. Often, the guitarist would stoke brief passages into an escalating frenzy of bent and elided notes, sustained as a plasmatic shimmer, while all of the other musicians seemed to busy themselves in their individual orbits: Mr. Berne chugging through cycles of horn riffs like a steam engine; Mr. Rainey slipping between the hyperkinesis of drum ‘n’ bass rhythms and the atmospheric tremors of the tom-toms, and Mr. Taborn massaging his Fender Rhodes for appropriately spectral emanations from the 1970s jazz-funk continuum.

But if you thought the band was not entirely in synch, you weren’t listening. The great fun of this sort of outfit is tuning deeply into its off-kilter percolations and bending an ear to discover how all the pieces fit together. It’s as if the music, which had the feel of something improvised over some prearranged patterns, was a kind of unusual mechanism, like an eccentric Swiss watch — precise in peculiar ways. The deeper structure, rich in color and bustling sweat equity, consistently rewarded patient listening, especially when complex rhythmic ideas would arise, unite, and evaporate, propelling a transit from panic to trance.

In the meanwhile, it was often enough to revel in the warp-drive effusions of Mr. Torn’s guitars, which unleashed a dynamic wallop that was rare to experience in the relatively snug and upscale confines of Joe’s. Mr. Torn would not have to stretch too far if he decided to scale his music for theaters or arenas (just add amplifiers — lots!). The problem is that it’s not 1971 and there is no Fillmore East: An audience of 150 is mighty good for geared-up displays of extravagant, sci-fi soundscapes. Everyone else, grab your headphones.