By Madelyn Stone, News Staff

The hurdles of contract signing, delays in poster printing caused by power outages and the allure of St. Patrick’s festivities may have made a Saturday night concert in afterHOURS seem destined for trouble, but Washed Out’s 7 p.m. show filled the venue nearly to capacity.

Tastemakers began planning the event in January, the group’s president  Jeff Curry said. As audience members slowly filed in around the start time, Curry, a middler behavioral neuroscience major, anticipated the concert would be a success.

“I’m expecting it to be a great show,” he said. “Sound check sounded terrific, so I’m very excited.”

Scheduling conflicts pushed the event to the holiday date, but attendance still ran high with 270 people filling afterHOURS, which has a 276-person capacity, during the course of the night.

The Strange Mangers, which includes sophomore music industry major Dan Lewicki, opened the show. They played for an hour, their self-described “vague rock” sound setting the scene for a night of moodily underscored ambient music.

With the contributions of a bassist, drummer and keyboardist, Washed Out performed original songs like “You and I” and “Get Up” from behind a synthesizer.

Tastemakers described Washed Out’s Ernest Greene as a “chillwave guru.” A Georgia native, Greene graduated with a master’s degree in library sciences in 2009 and started producing songs from his bedroom while he was searching for a job. The librarian position may not have worked out, but Greene’s MySpace uploads gained the attention of international music blogs and soon he was performing across the country, earning coverage from The New York Times, the Guardian and Pitchfork.

Greene had just played a set in Austin, Texas at South by Southwest, and flew into Boston the morning of the afterHOURS concert.

“This is actually our first show in Boston,” he told the crowd. “So I’m pretty excited about it.”

Also visiting Boston – some for the first time – were about a dozen students from Union University in Jackson, Tenn. They were flying north for a spring break service project when they realized they were sharing a plane with the musician.

T.R. Parker, an outreach librarian at Union University, had been a fan of Washed Out’s music for several months. When they started talking to the artist on the plane he immediately accepted Greene’s offer to see the show.

“We were sitting right next to him on the plane today,” Parker said. “I guess they had a connecting flight in Memphis to Boston. I was like, ‘No way, you’re Washed Out?’ And what’s cool is Ernest Greene went to library school and I’m a librarian so you know, I thought that was awesome.”

Parker said he heard about Washed Out on National Public Radio (NPR) and liked the musician’s mellow sound.

“Their recorded music is something that you can put on to study to, like to chill,” Parker said. “But this was a little bit more energetic, a little bit more dance-y. You can have more fun with it. I thought it was great.”

Kasra Ghorbaninejad, a first year literary and cultural studies PhD. candidate, was not familiar with Washed Out or the Strange Mangers before coming to the concert. He said he enjoyed the show but thought some aesthetic was lacking in the bands’ technical coordination.

“It was good, I liked the bands,” he said. “I like the genre, like ambience and stuff, like the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. And these bands somehow resemble that band. But I don’t know about the level of technical stuff that they put into their songs, you know, I think it’s not that deep when it comes to technical matters. But still, it was very nice.”

Lewicki, the lead singer for the Strange Mangers, said the show was “a pretty massive success.”

“We’ve been playing as a four-piece since August I think and we probably, before the Washed Out show, played I don’t know, maybe around a dozen, 15 shows together as a band?” he said. “We were pumped about the show, started promoting it ourselves a couple weeks ago, but we didn’t really have to because Tastemakers got the word to most of the Northeastern community. There was a sick turnout. Bigger than probably just about all the other shows we’ve played.”

And if ambient music could attract this big of a crowd on St. Patrick’s Day, then Boston should be prepared for Washed Out’s next appearance at the Paradise Rock Club on April 20.

“If you think this is mellow, it’s going to be really mellow then,” Greene said.