Photo courtesy of Bobby Granfelt
UCLA Radio’s Rising Artist Spotlight aims to highlight upcoming artists who have demonstrated unique creativity and talent through their music. Through interviews and features, we delve into their journey, influences, and aspirations, giving listeners a glimpse into the future of music.
Bobby Granfelt, founding member of sunking and co-creator of Rare Candy, has been surrounded by music since a young age. In his band’s third recorded album, I DON’T LIKE MY TELEPHONE, sunking explores the art of genre mixing through electronic and jazz fusion. I sat down with Granfelt to discuss the importance of the DIY ethos, the role of community within music, and the evolution of sunking’s sound.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity purposes
Interviewed by Amanda Romankiw
Amanda: I’m going to start off with a couple of hot seat questions to break the ice. Dead or alive, who would be your dream Coachella headliners?
Bobby: Outcast, Prince, and Miles Davis’s Second Quintet.
Amanda: Awesome. What’s your favorite neighborhood in LA?
Bobby: Leimert Park, but Highland Park, because I live here.
Amanda: Any favorite albums or new artists so far in 2025?
Bobby: Khadija Al Hanafi.
Amanda: Now going into more personal questions. How did you discover your love of music, and when did you realize you wanted to pursue a profession in it?
Bobby: I always loved music. I didn’t know I wanted to do it seriously until I played my cousin’s drum set when I was 12, and I just fell in love. I immediately convinced my parents to get me a drum set for Christmas, and I started a band. And then as I got older, it became more of like, “Is it really what you want to do?” And the answer just kept on being “Yes.”
Amanda: Were there any drummers you looked up to growing up?
Bobby: Totally. My entry point I loved Green Day and Blink-182. So Travis Barker and Tré Cool. I remember learning those songs verbatim and understanding song structure through that. And then I think Thomas Pridgen was a really big one for me.
Amanda: Was there anything that made you gravitate towards the drums rather than other instruments?
Bobby: Definitely, I think it’s such a physical instrument, and I grew up playing sports. I’m very much a physical person. I have a lot of energy. It demands a certain amount of coordination and physical prowess that I think that I gravitated towards. I played piano when I was young. I really liked playing music, but I couldn’t do the structure. I remember just having so much energy my feet would be swinging from the piano bench because my feet couldn’t reach the ground. I just had all this energy.
Amanda: That’s really cool. So, would you say you spent most of your childhood in Seattle or Los Angeles?
Bobby: In a suburb of Seattle. So I was shaped by that music scene, shaped by all ages seen in the greater Seattle area. Yeah, definitely by DIY.
Amanda: Do you think living in Los Angeles has influenced your sound or style at all?
Bobby: One-trillion-percent, absolutely. I feel like it has enabled the sounds to sort of be endless as far as imagination goes. On this last sunking record, there’s a lot of collaboration, and a lot of those collaborators live here. There’s people here that are wonderfully talented and super cool friends. The collaborative community here has had a huge influence on our sound.
Amanda: I feel like Los Angeles is so big and so fast paced that, at least how I would view it, it would feel kind of intimidating breaking into that music scene. Did you feel any of that?
Bobby: It took a little time? When people move to LA, I tell them to really not evaluate it until you’ve been here for four years. This might be some people’s experience in college, where your freshman year you’re like, This sucks. I want to transfer. But then you find your people and start to build them. And then by year four, you’re like, I never want to leave. So, yeah, it can be intimidating. I think it takes time.
Amanda: That’s a good analogy. I totally see that applying to college.
Bobby: LA is one of those things too, where it’s a really tough city, especially if you don’t have a car. LA is really 20 different cities at once, and they’re fully fledged. You have your grocery store, you have your community, you can have a whole place that you really don’t need to leave, and that can be really cool. But also, if you’re new here, you’re trying to find where the cool musicians are and where the cool shows are. Some of the above-ground stuff can be snake oil, you know what I mean? Like, some of the classic venues that you know in Hollywood. Finding out where the things are actually happening can take time. Then you find them, and you’re like, “Oh, this is so bountiful.”
Amanda: Yeah, there’s a pretty good music scene within my school community. I definitely have been wanting to branch outside of campus, so I look forward to exploring that.
Bobby: Yeah, you should come to one of the Rare Candies.
Amanda: Oh, I would love to. So how did sunking first come together as a band?
Bobby: I’ve known Antoine, the other original member, since we were 15. We had both just finished college and wanted to start making stuff together. Initially the idea was that it was going to be sort of led by me. I had this vision to make this really frenetic, crazy, sort of hyper jazz thing. And what came out was just simple beats that Antoine started to lay stuff over. And at that point in our development, we were just like, fuck. We just made a whole beat front to back. That’s sick. We’ve never done that before. So we were like, let’s just make this a whole project. Initially, the first two records all started with songs that the very first thing we did was drums, and I would just improvise a drum tape, and whatever it was, was the song. And then finally, on this new record, we were able to try some new stuff. So now it feels like we sort of actually arrived.
Amanda: I listened to the new album; it’s really cool. I haven’t heard anything like it before. How would you describe sunking’s sound to someone who’s never heard of you guys before?
Bobby: I say it’s a product of a drummer-producer who loves jazz and hip hop and electronic music, put with a classically trained pianist and composer who loves film scores and modern art. I think there’s some crossover.
Amanda: Totally! I can definitely see that reflected in the new album and in your past work. Okay, so moving on to Rare Candy. What inspired you to start throwing these house shows?
Bobby: Actually, we were doing a Rare Candy meeting here before with Lindsay [Ralls]. So Rare Candy is our thing. Highland Park has a really wonderful music community, and has had one for a long time. There used to be more frequent neighborhood shows, but there wasn’t anything happening consistently in the neighborhood. I am really, really fortunate to have a super dope little backyard where I can throw shows. I wanted to do a show in the backyard, but I didn’t have the bandwidth and the skills to do everything properly. And then Lindsay was booking at the time for The Stowaway Downtown venue, and she put together this J Dilla show on very short notice in celebration of J Dilla’s life with a bunch of legends. She asked me to put together a band to play some drums and do a set attributed to Dilla. The night just was amazing. On such short notice, I was just really impressed with how she did all that. And I was just like, Oh, you’re the missing piece to this idea. So then we just started to pull from our mutual communities. There’s a lot of crossover, but she’s really tapped in with the DJ community, and I’m tapped in with the jazz community. We’re all doing this crossover show where we were doing three DJs and three bands, and it’s intentional so the DJs are just as much a focal point. It started with this idea to have this thing in the backyard with genuine love, good music and great people.
Amanda: How would you describe the community that’s formed around these shows? I know you mentioned how that’s an integral aspect of it.
Lindsay: It’s very artist-oriented at its core. All of the different artists that the shows pulled from come from a really wide network of LA scenes. Even just the jazz scenes alone, you’ve got your Lionmilk or HUMAN ERROR CLUB. But then you’ve got, Leaving Records — pocketed stuff. And then there’s where [Bobby] fits in. He crosses over and does a lot of hip hop, almost like a poetic group of rappers. And then even the DJs are playing really underground shit, and they’re making our music. The community pulls from the best supporters of each of those scenes. They’re the people who lived in LA for 20 years — people that went to house shows in Highland Park in the 2000s and ‘90s. It’s crazy. I definitely feel like at this point it’s growing beyond the internal nucleus of our community, which is awesome.
Bobby: Like Lindsey said, the initial community is a bunch of sweetheart musicians that are really talented and work their asses off doing it.
Amanda: Yeah, totally. It’s really cool. Is there a specific show that stood out that you still look back on today?
Bobby: We had a legendary DJ from out of town. Lindsay and I both love music and we love booking and putting people on. We had the opportunity to fly out DJ Earl, who’s this legendary DJ from Chicago, who does footwork music and beyond. People were just like, holy shit. How’d you get DJ Earl out here? It’s because he sees the vision. It was beautiful.
Lindsay: They’ve all been beautiful. It’s also the nature of the space, being outdoors. We have food; people are playing chess. We had an arts and crafts area one time. People don’t feel the need to leave. People genuinely get to know each other, and that makes the shows all that more potent from the community end of things.
Amanda: You’re really selling me! I have to check it out. Okay, I’m going to move on to your new album, I DON’T LIKE MY TELEPHONE. How would you describe the album in three words?
Bobby: Nostalgic, frenetic, and intentional.
Amanda: What were the early stages like for navigating sounds or themes for this album?
Bobby: Some of these go back as early as COVID. Before I moved to LA I lived with Antoine, and we were up in the Seattle area. I just started to record a lot of drums, sort of in the similar way that we did our previous albums. But this time, instead of the drums being just live takes, I was like, I’m going to chop stuff, I’m going to loop stuff, I’m going to put weird effects on something, or LFO on something. I’m just going to do some weird stuff. And we basically started the album from the premise that we wanted to do something different. Most of the songs sort of came about organically over the course of the last three or four years, and some of them came about on tour.
Amanda: Do you think this album’s shift towards electronic music marks a greater shift in defining sunking’s sound?
Bobby: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that the first two sunking records were sort of like demo tapes that we had made. All of the drums were recorded with two microphones, and were as early as 2015. We had all this music from those demos that we had to put out as records because we needed to have records for all these different reasons. Then we got to a resting point after SMUG, which is our album before I DON’T LIKE MY TELEPHONE. We were like, Okay, we get to do something different. What do we want to do? We don’t want to be a jazz band. That’s not what we are as a duo. So we were like, how do we make this pronounced? Electronic step is definitely where the future is going.
Amanda: Are there any other genres or techniques that you’d be interested in incorporating or experimenting with in future projects?
Bobby: Everything? Like I said, Antoine is busy with film score and ambient music — really creative stuff that’s new music and that is all going to creep in. Jazz, obviously, is sort of always there. Antoine and I are always looking for something that feels interesting and fresh.
Amanda: Can you think of any artists that you drew inspiration from or influenced the style of this album?
Bobby: Flying Lotus has always been a big middle ground of Antoine and my Venn diagram. We were listening to a lot of Larry Heard and early house music, and then also really getting into some deep modular synth stuff. It was sort of an interesting cocktail of things.
Amanda: Were there any tracks that were especially memorable to make or that are your favorite?
Bobby: I feel like my favorite, at least right now, is what I feel like a lot of people might say. “BAND PRACTICE” feels maroon colored — like this molasses, sunlight, warmth that sort of just holds you in this awe.
Amanda: One of the tracks on the record, “HOW TO SWING,” features Niki Randa, who has collaborated with artists like Flying Lotus and Thundercat. How did that come about? And how did you feel during that process?
Bobby: It was a dream to work with Niki. Initially, how we got connected was through Angel Deradoorian, who’s also on the record. Turns out that Niki actually lives like, three blocks away, and we’re homies now. She’s been to a handful of the Rare Candies. It’s just cool how music can put you in touch with wonderful people and help you form genuine relationships with artists that you’re gonna keep working with.
Amanda: If this album was a city, what would it look like, and how would it feel?
Bobby: Hmm, that’s interesting. I feel like the title track, the one with Salami on it, would feel like cyberpunk vibes. I think it would be stressful, but that’s the only song on the record that might feel like that. The rest of the record probably feels sort of away from that city and looking at it.
Amanda: I totally see that. How do you hope listeners will connect with this album?
Bobby: Well, I hope that they can connect on two levels. The first level is that I hope it connects with their body and that they’re just able to feel it. That was the intention of this — to create body music in a certain way. Then there’s the intentional intricacies. You can feel it on a surface level, put it on in the background and enjoy it. Or you could listen to it with headphones in and see what fill happens in the drums on the fourth bar, or what LFO flies from the left ear to the right ear. We were trying to create something that could exist on both levels.
Amanda: I definitely felt the physical element while also really focusing on the technicalities used throughout the album. It was a really cool experience. Lastly, is there anything you’d like to shout out?
Bobby: Rare Candy, Rare Candy, Rare Candy. Everyone is invited. That’s become a special place, and we want everyone to feel like they’re welcome to come. sunking is playing in November here in LA and then we’re going to have some crazy remixes coming out of songs from I DON’T LIKE MY TELEPHONE.
