Family Plan by Ringula

When the fluorescent hum takes over after dark, and the mirrorball starts to spin a little slower, that's when my shift truly begins. 'Family Plan' is what happens when you stare at a switchboard long enough that you start seeing faces in the blinking lights. It’s an album born in the quiet ache of graveyard shifts, where every extension isn't just a line, but a thread reaching across time, across oceans, into my own family tree. We took the everyday sounds of the call center—that ringback climbing, the harsh SIT error triads, the click of a stapler, even the thrum of a pager motor—and stretched them into something pulsing, something you can dance to, something that holds a story. That syrupy Italo arp, the deep 909 thud? They're the pulse of history, pushing through the static.

This isn't just a collection of tracks; it’s one long night on the floor. You clock in with me on "Open Line" and feel that nervous tension, the board a map of ghosts. Then, you hear the raw confessions on "Please Hold Me," the kind you can only whisper into a headset when you're barely holding it together, mascara streaking. The way a machine can mangle a name, turn it into something else, something personal, that's "Misread." It's about how immigrant names sometimes feel, bent by the system, and how we fight to reclaim them. Then, the board becomes an altar on "Switchboard Blood," linking all those forgotten voices, those old voicemails, into a lush, breathing chorus.

We journey through "Roaming Lullaby," those late-night calls across continents, splicing grandma's hum into a DTMF scale, finding comfort in the wandering. And in "Graveyard Heir," I found the old operator logs, pages filled with names of women who kept the lines alive for decades, who wore their own kind of lipstick-smeared uniform. That's when you realize this whole spooky-camp thing, it’s not just an act. It’s labor folklore, passed down. And then, the explosion: "Press 1." That chant, it just erupted from somewhere deep. It's about turning loneliness into this roaring, beautiful togetherness, making a living choir out of strangers on a hotline, out of bodies on a dance floor. You feel that 909 slam, those supersaws tower, and for a minute, the room shakes with everyone's shared need.

It all winds down on "Trunk Hymn," when the queue clears, and the trunk noise settles into a kind of gentle prayer, holding us. And finally, "Numbers In My Blood"—a promise, really. To carry these stories, these connections, into tomorrow. We wanted to build something that feels both fiercely personal and universally shared, taking those cold, digital signals and finding the heartbeat inside them. Something that makes you want to dial in, sing along, and remember who you are and where you come from, even under a fanged mirrorball glare. This is about making trance-pop a place where history lives, where every beep and buzz carries the weight of generations, and where a dance floor can become a family reunion. It might just stick with you. Make you think.

Ringula: your calls, our disco. We're a graveyard shift vamp, spinning trance-pop from phone static. Campy smiles hide the ache.