A group of local musicians have crafted a unique mix of hard-hitting electronic music and nonstop humor.
Close Friends Only, aka CFO, is a group of Coachella Valley creatives who have garnered viral attention via their frequent live streams. Angel Ortiz (Angeltiz), Francisco Felix (KEESCO), Jacob Guaydacan (JustJake), Gabriel Loustaunau (VelvetSent), Robert Navarro (Bobby Banz) and Manuel Bautista (JR) make up the collective, and at 7 p.m., every Monday and Friday, you can see the group in front of a green screen—featuring video-game footage from the 2000s—cracking jokes and sharing intense bass drops and electronic remixes.
Clips from CFO have exploded on TikTok, gaining millions of views and tens of thousands of likes. One of my favorite clips features the line, “If your homeboy has a birthday countdown on his (Instagram) story, that’s your homegirl,” followed by a bass-filled EDM breakdown.
During a recent interview with Angel Ortiz, he explained how he formed the group—although he had different plans in mind.
“CFO, Close Friends Only, got started around late 2021,” Ortiz said. “I remember around this time, I was making music, and I was trying to build this sort of empire around what I was doing at the time. I knew I had to branch out to have something to be represented by, in a sense. It was initially going to be a clothing brand. … I announced it in January of 2022 as my label, my collective, and basically my group. From there, it kind of just did its own thing. The first few members were me, my boy (Miguel Bautista) and then KEESCO.”
Ortiz decided to focus on running things through his collective to uplift everyone’s careers.
“I was like, ‘You know what? I think we need to find some sort of a blueprint towards us as a group, and push things towards that way,’” he said. “I kind of proposed to them and said, ‘I should have you guys just join Close Friends Only, and that way, everything we do—because we’re already doing everything together—is all in one world.’ That way, we could push everything as a group, and have everyone ideally just benefit from it.”
A period of trial and error followed, Ortiz said.
“We started doing a lot of sets, for YouTube and stuff like that,” he said. “We started doing shows. The shows went well, and then eventually, we had this kind of roadblock. You know how the valley is; it’s hard to find venues to do stuff at, and all that type of stuff.”
The group was forced to think of new ways to explore their creativity, and CFO set their sights on Twitch.
“Jake (Jacob Guaydacan, JustJake) was doing research and found out Twitch was coming up with this new program for DJs,” Ortiz said. “You weren’t able to play music on Twitch because of some copyright issue, and then they finally did some partnership, or were able to get that enabled for people to start DJing on Twitch. Weeks before it even came out, we already knew about it, and Jake was kind of tapping the team in, saying, ‘We should prepare for this and try to start doing sets on Twitch.’”
If the members of CFO weren’t so damn good at remixing songs and making super-hype DJ sets, they’d perhaps have a future in standup comedy. Check out their TikTok page to see the best of their hilarity and bass drops. You can catch a stream every Monday and Friday at 7 p.m. on their Twitch account.
“I remember the first stream I went to; I realized everyone was saying funny-ass shit on the mic in between,” Ortiz said. “I took it upon myself to basically think of ways to promote the stream, because at this time, there was nobody watching this shit. You know how Twitch is—that shit is hard as fuck. I was thinking of ways to promote the stream, so I made a teaser of a compilation of just the chaos in there, and from there, the guys picked up, and then everyone kind of started adding on to the formula. Eventually, we figured out a way to make it entertaining—and then from there, it just went crazy.”
CFO’s online presence is captivating and contagious. You can catch CFO hosting “BOOM BOOM ROOM HORIZON,” a live version of their online craziness, at Little Street Music Hall on Saturday, Nov. 9.
“We’ve been doing the show since before the stream … but now, we’re able to market it to a way wider audience,” Ortiz said. “The dynamic of the group is … to just be around, and then obviously, we’re going to record everything. We’re finding ways to make it cohesive with the stream and how well it’s going right now.”
As CFO deals with the attention they’ve received online, the group is also figuring out how to use the project as a vehicle to share their personal music.
“We’re building a platform for ourselves to put these things in front of people without being, like, ‘Listen to this; this is my song,’” Ortiz said. “I feel like everyone in the industry tries to figure out: How do you put something in front of people without telling them that you put it in front of them? We’re working on a lot of cool music to ideally mend all this together, because the end goal is the music at the end of the day. This is just a way to showcase how we are in general as a friend group. None of this shit is really staged or scripted; a lot of this is us just being us, and I love that people are getting to witness that. It’s something very organic, and I think that’s why they connect with it so much. … It’s cool to see so many people want to be a part of this community that we’re building.”
Close Friends Only will host “BOOM BOOM ROOM HORIZON” at 6:30 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 9, at Little Street Music Hall, 82707 Miles Ave., in Indio. Tickets are $15.85. For tickets and more info, find the event on Fanimal. Learn more at www.instagram.com/theclosefriendsonly.