It's my third day hanging with WEDIDIT's eclectic-sounding electronic collective in Los Angeles, but aside from these brief cameos, Laufer has been reclusive in a manner that befits his moody music. As other people float in and out of the common space—firing up Ableton in the control room, scrounging for AA batteries in the shelving unit by the door—the only real constant presence is Nick Meledandri, who is currently leaning back in a chair, scanning Gmail. Meledandri—DJ name Nick Melons—runs the label component of WEDIDIT. He also works for Mixed Management, a company that manages "Harlem Shake" producer Baauer and heartthrob singer-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr., in addition to multiple people in WEDIDIT, including Shlohmo and EDM festival darling RL Grime. Meledandri lives with RL Grime in a big house in the hills of Los Feliz, where they've been known to host the odd Boiler Room show in the garage. Unusually, Meledandri is both a subject of my story and a handler who is helping me to report it—scheduling interviews and shuttling everyone from place to place. With his boyish frame, easy laugh, and animated brown eyes, he comes across as a chattier breed of cool kid than Laufer, eager to help me decode the group's insular existence. "I've always said that it feels kind of like an airplane in here," he says of the studio. "You can never tell what time of day it is."

Meledandri and Laufer have been friends since they were 12 years old, when they met at the progressive-minded Los Angeles private school Crossroads. That's also where they met fellow founding member Groundislava, né Jasper Patterson, now a tall and stocky, happy-go-lucky sneakerhead with a penchant for referencing video game soundtracks in his instrumental pop. They've been calling themselves WEDIDIT since they were around 16 or 17, when they began driving around, smoking weed, igniting bottle rockets, and shouting, "We did it!" at people on the street. Since then, they've leveraged their shared penchant for party music, clothes, and juvenile provocation into a fully functioning music and lifestyle brand, consisting of a record label, a clothing line, and a group of BFFs you can't resist stalking on Instagram. The label generates income primarily via merch sales, and the artists earn their living through a combination of touring and licensing deals. WEDIDIT's unofficial motto is "professionally unprofessional." Their logo is a tombstone inscribed with the name of the collective and a smiley face, both a declaration of success and a nihilistic reminder of their inevitable obsolescence.

Spend a couple of days in their orbit, and you'll find that logo repeated pretty much everywhere you look, from a fluorescent sign on the wall in Meledandri and RL Grime's living room to the tiny gravestone pendants they're always wearing around their necks. All of the members of the collective, at all times, are wearing some item from the group's catalog of black and white tees, hoodies, and patches. When you see them walking down the street in the California sun, the monochrome uniform makes them less like a crew of bedroom producers than a band of punks who survive by sticking close together at all times. Chances are one of them will be wrapping an arm around the friend who's walking beside him, whispering something in his ear.