Adam Matlock (Brian Slattery in the background) at Cafe Nine last Thursday. Lucy Gellman Photos.

A propulsive accordion had Cafe Nine rising to its feet. On stage, Adam Matlock closed his eyes and conjured a street in Romania, cobblestones flying from his fingertips to form something old and dusty and romantic. A shrill, earthy fiddle inserted itself in the conversation, chatting with the drumbeat that came in two steps behind it. The song had no name—not one that anyone could remember—and that was no problem at all.

That was the scene Thursday night at Cafe Nine, as Tiny Ocean and the newly-formed band Kolegi took the stage for a double bill that lasted for almost two hours (the third act, musician Julia Friend, came down with a cold and was unable to perform). A small but intimate crowd braved plummeting temperatures for the show.

An offshoot of the Harris Brothers Balkan Band, Kolegi first formed last year, as members Helen Marx (percussion), Adam Matlock (accordion and voice) and Brian Slattery (fiddle and voice) found themselves talking about performing Balkan folk tunes together. Last September, Matlock recalled, the idea gained momentum—then “fell off our radar” as schedules filled up for the fall. The three recommitted to the idea in November, and have been practicing since.

The band’s name comes from the Serbo-Croatian word for “colleague,” with which fellow musicians greeted Marx on a trip to Macedonia and Serbia last year. When she first heard it, it was as a warm, rising welcome, filled with affection and mutual respect for the craft.

“It means ‘one of us,’ she said during the set, lifting round drums in and out of her lap as if they weighed nothing.

Thursday, that camaraderie filled the bar, often dripping from the stage to a floor dimly lit in pink and blue light. Stepping up to the mic just after 9 p.m., Tiny Ocean’s Kierstin Sieser launched into a set that had both comfort and teeth, band members Jon Morse (bass) and Keith Newman (drums) in lockstep with her. Audience members swayed in their seats as the group cycled from the slow, heart-plucking “Astronaut” to a full-lunged “Bang Bang Bang,” guitar and drum pounding from the floor right into one's chest.

At first live listen, Sieser is a dead ringer for Neko Case—close your eyes, and a slowed-down, more soulful New Pornographers are right there, mouths at shell-shaped curve of your ear. But open them, and Tiny Ocean is something much more delicious: soulful vocals with just a little whine and twang, and smart lyrics that seem like they’ve always belonged in the world. Sieser is a storyteller, spinning worlds into shiny, compact things somewhere between her guitar and her throat. On stage, a curtain of yellow stars twinkled softly behind her as she sang.

With a Balkan wind that blew in after her, Tiny Ocean is also hygge—a Danish concept of coziness— personified. As Kolegi took the stage, Matlock praised Sieser as spreading warmth through every part of the bar, from attendees in the front to a few who had filtered in during the first set, and pressed themselves close to the bar and the back wall.

“Her voice is something you can kind of crawl into for the winter,” he said before introducing the group’s first tune, a take on an old Greek standard that began with plunging accordion before blooming into full, exuberant fiddle and a drum that was nearly as big as Marx.

Kolegi is ear-grabbing, awkward, and endearing, in exactly the way an experimental folksy offshoot of a Balkan band should be. In one number, they have made a pit stop in Greece, playing past its bright white and blue roofs and into the ocean, instruments diving and rising again like birds on the hunt for food. In another, they’re onto Romania, deep into a folk song that they have recreated from memory. It’s a kind of music that calls for collective dancing, where everyone links hands and and probably sits down afterward at a table with oily fish and butter beans.

For the ear not accustomed to it, it’s hard to get used to—like entering a synagogue for the first time when you’ve been singing in a church your whole life. But it didn’t take long Thursday for the audience to feel the music, sound permeating the space table by table, then sinking in bone deep. After the first two songs, attendees who had stayed for the set cheered, applause filling the space.

“I’m appreciating your enthusiasm, because this is the kind of sound you have to get into,” Slattery joked from the stage, his fiddle almost an extension of his body until he broke between songs. Still grinning, he and Matlock launched into the group’s third piece, a Greek ballad they described as “basically about drug smugglers” to a smattering of laughs from the crowd. Something atonal and low filled the quarter-full bar, calling out for dancers in its wake.

The group flowed into an “extremely drunken sounding dance,” and suddenly there were the streets of Romania again, music conjuring the blurred, vibrating lens of moving after too much liquor. On stage, a sort of back and forth unfolded in real time, fiddle and accordion getting sloshed together and trying to walk each other home. On the drum, Marx let loose, egging them on in a sort of happy, buzzed circle.

It is, indeed, music that is meant to be moved to in a different way. By the time musicians had moved into their orchestration of four keyboard tunes Matlock had written, music writer Karen Ponzio and musician Lys Guillorn had taken a tiny corner of the floor, belly dancing to the rhythm as it washed over them.

Back on stage, Slattery dubbed the group’s first show “a big nerd-off,” a goofy label they all seemed to wear with pride. By the end of the set, Matlock was beaming. After the show, he described the group’s process of writing—a tune will pop into his or another member’s head, they’ll hum it out, write some things down, and then practice it together until it sounds right. Then they’ll move onto another song, and start from square one.

“This was kind of like wish fulfillment for all of us,” he said.

For more from Thursday’s show, check out the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s Facebook live videos from the event.