Kaan and Mindolé are, on paper, an unlikely pairing. One comes from a city where East and West have been colliding, merging and misunderstanding each other for millennia. The other from deep mid-America, where the sonic DNA runs through gospel, country and the kind of bone-dry blues that sounds like it came up out of the actual earth. That these two should find each other in Central Europe and make something that sounds like *this* — languorous, textured, ominous in the gentlest possible way — feels either like cosmic accident or quiet genius. Possibly both.
The EP's lead track and calling card, *Happy Together*, arrives with the confidence of a song that already knows it doesn't need to try. It doesn't announce itself so much as materialise — a drum machine pulse beneath reverb-soaked guitars that carry more than a little of the Bosphorus in their tuning, and above it all, female vocals so soft they barely disturb the air. This is music that doesn't chase you. It waits. And you come to it, eventually, because you can't help it. Think early Morcheeba stripped of their trip-hop smoothness, or Boy Harsher with the darkness turned down and the melancholy turned up. Think *Twin Peaks* if Angelo Badalamenti had grown up listening to Anatolian folk radio.
The accompanying video, bathed in crimson, is precisely calibrated: a little bit sexy, a little bit sad, and suffused with a coolness that never tips into self-consciousness. It understands, as the best music videos do, that the job is not to illustrate the song but to haunt it.
As a complete body of work, *There Was, There Wasn't* operates in dualisms — which is fitting for a record made by two people from opposite ends of the world. Eerie and comforting. Shimmering and solid. Cold in temperature, hot in atmosphere. There's eastern-inflected guitar work ghosting over electronic percussion with a steadiness that becomes almost meditative; textured, layered sound design that rewards headphones and closed eyes. And underneath it all, humming like a refrigerator in an empty flat at 3am, the very modern anxiety of trying to exist in a world moving faster than memory can process.
The band describe their music as "faded VHS tapes of half-remembered dreams," and it's one of those rare instances where an artist's own description is neither overreach nor false modesty — it's simply accurate. There is something irreducibly *analogue* about the emotional register here, even as the production is crisp and deliberate. These are songs about the layers of time we carry without knowing it.
Pity Party Records, the Berlin-based collective behind the release, have shown themselves to be curators of a particular sensibility: underground without being obscure, atmospheric without being indulgent. *There Was, There Wasn't* fits their aesthetic precisely, yet transcends it — this is music that could soundtrack an underground Berlin dance night at 4am, yes, but it is equally suited to a still evening, a warm room, and the specific pleasure of doing absolutely nothing in the company of something beautiful.
Odd Little Thrills are, on this evidence, neither odd nor little. They are the real thing: two people who have made something genuinely *theirs*, something that could not have been made by anyone else, in any other combination, in any other city. That is rarer than it should be. That is worth paying attention to.
*There Was, There Wasn't* is out now on Pity Party Records.