“So, how many of you have the new album?” Juana Molina asked in a charming Spanish accent as she got comfortable with the wall-to-wall crowd at her recent club stop in Chicago. After an overwhelming applause, she jokingly lamented, “Well I guess I won’t be selling much tonight then.”

Riding high off the buzz of her latest electro-folk release, Un Dia (Domino), and a coveted gig opening for Feist on her 2008 summer tour, the 47-year-old Argentinean singer, dressed in a fur-trimmed parka (“How do you live in this cold?”), modest black dress, white tights, and brown Mary Janes, made a rare presence at the newly renovated world music stage of the Morse Theatre.

Flanked by a full regalia of instruments and a full band for the first time in her oft-solo career, the hour-and-a-half-long set, sung completely in Spanish, effectively invoked the haunting percussion and grand rhythmic arrangements that took her ambient folk music into the digital age on tracks like “Los Hongos de Marosa,” “¿Quien? (Suite),” and “Vive Solo.”

Her performance neatly coincided with the televised circus known as the Academy Awards, and, although Molina may have never won an Oscar for her previous acting on Latin American sketch comedies, the musical mastery and vocal risk-taking that she has displayed on five albums in the past 13 years document that there actually exists an artist who seamlessly transitioned from actress to musician, and is quite possibly even better for it.

Perhaps Molina’s background in improv is what makes her so gifted in crafting songs that offer the best surprises, her talent lying somewhere in the middle of scat jazz and an unforeseen breakdown. Molina proves that she is the queen of her noise playground, an audible laboratory that combines the most random horns with eerie vocal repetition and echoes that fall off of cymbals and guitar strings, abandoning conventional rhythm patterns to push Molina past the typecasting of generic world compilations.

Although most didn’t know what she was singing about (whether the lyrics were in her native tongue or a gutteral hodgepodge that sounded like Spanish yodeling), Molina managed to keep the attention of everyone in the room. For although most songs passed the safe five-minute mark, each one felt like a grand adventure akin to a psychedelic trip through the tranquility of the South American rainforest.

At one point in the evening, Molina returned to solo form and proved exactly why it fit her for so long. As she moved from stomping on foot pedals to massaging her guitar and flittering over octaves on her keyboard on title track “Un Dia,” Molina appeared to be a one-woman fortress with a tonal range that alone could have made up for her backing band.

When the band did return for the one-song encore, the musicians brought with them three plastic cups and a pair of stools. As Molina crouched down at their level in a complicated juggling act of passing cups with clapping and high-fiving in between, she showed, once again, that the best entertainment is not always as scripted as a Hollywood affair, but rather relies on the unexpected.

-- Selena Fragassi