Take a look at the picture below. That's Terry Riley on the organ at Walt Disney Concert Hall. On Saturday night he looked like the biblical God, white beard flowing as he conjured huge sound out of the Frank Gehry-designed machine. And to a certain segment of society, Riley is the Creator. His massively influential work stretches back 45 years to the release of "In C," the hypnotic modernist mantra that stacked sound upon sound in neatly piled rows. The sheer heft of the aggregate would have been unsupportable had its underlying ideas not been so structurally magnificent.

Timothy Norris

Terry Riley performs on the Frank Gehry-designed organ at Disney Hall

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Riley performed during the opening night of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's 'West Coast, Left Coast' festival along with Kronos Quartet, Matmos and Mark Einziger, all of whose work has been somehow influenced by the ideas that Riley has set forth. Over the course of three-and-a-half hours, the musicians stacked their creations atop one another like some sort of musical exquisite corpse, and though there were moments of wobbly unsteadiness, there weren't any collapses.

Timothy Norris

Matmos performs with Kronos Quartet

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The evening followed a unique template: each artist performed a solo work, then was joined by the next artist for a collaboration, who then performed a solo work. Kronos Quartet began the evening with a new piece by LA-based film composer Thomas Newman entitled "It Got Dark." A series of ten seemingly distinct miniatures, the piece moved from soft and plaintive string quartet/electronic hums to bursts of rushed energy. (The LA Phil will perform an orchestrated version of the piece with John Adams conducting next week at Disney.) The quartet, which has had a long collaborative relationship with Riley, were then joined by San Francisco electronic duo Matmos for a massive, jaw-dropping version of their composition "For Terry Riley."

Timothy Norris

Matmos and Kronos

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The piece began rather gently, with Kronos and Matmos creating sounds with toy hammers, percussion, and whistles. They banged on their music stands and stools, and gradually the chaos morphed into a patterned rhythm. This approach is Matmos' stock-in-trade: from randomness to order, while above a video screen projected images of, first, a close-up of a sink drain, then leaves and grass, then trippy patterns that recalled Brion Gysin's hallucinogenic Dream Machine. The original version of "For Terry Riley" featured the team sampling a Kronos rehearsal of an early Kronos/Riley collaboration ("Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector"). At Disney, they didn't need to sample; Kronos performed it live. This first part of the night was by far the highlight, but, then, for a certain segment of geek society (specifically, me), the idea of Kronos and Matmos onstage together is something of a dream come true, and carries with it the hope of further collaboration.