Kasheme — Zürich’s Living-Room Temple
By Rafi Mercer
New Listing
Venue Name: Kasheme
Address: Neugasse 56, 8005 Zürich, Switzerland.
Website: kasheme.com
Instagram: @kasheme
Zürich is a city that often prides itself on clarity. Its lake is mirror-still, its trams arrive on the second, its skyline is crisp with glass and order. Yet beneath that precision lives a hunger for looseness, for groove, for sound that feels lived in. Kasheme, hidden on Neugasse in District 5, answers that need with the intimacy of a living room and the curatorial ambition of a cultural institution. Walk up the narrow stairwell and step inside, and you are immediately in another register of the city — one softened by records, warmed by lamps, and tuned by conversation that bends itself to music.
The space is deceptively simple. Low ceilings, mismatched couches, shelves dense with vinyl, a bar that feels more like a kitchen counter than a commercial front. It could be someone’s apartment, if that someone had a world-class record collection and a taste for good cocktails. But listen for a moment and you know you are somewhere different. The system is voiced to be human-scale — bass present but never swollen, midrange rich enough that voices and horns sit in the room like guests, highs rolled to shimmer without fatigue. You can speak, you can move, but you cannot ignore.
Programming is as eclectic as Zürich itself. Spiritual jazz one evening, dub the next, a selector bringing obscure Afro-Brazilian cuts on a Friday, a DJ from London pulling cosmic disco on a Saturday. The transitions are seamless because the ethos is consistent: music that opens a room rather than closes it, records that draw people together rather than separate them. You look around and see strangers nodding to the same line, conversations starting with a sleeve as the prompt, community building from shared sound.
Kasheme is not just a bar. It is also a record store, an online radio station, a studio. These layers make it less a venue and more an ecosystem, a hub where listening culture thrives across formats. You might buy a record in the afternoon, hear it played that evening, and later stream a set from the same selector on their broadcast. In a city sometimes accused of reserve, Kasheme offers a counterpoint: openness, warmth, generosity in curation.
The drinks support without showboating. Cocktails are crafted, wines chosen with taste, beers local, but the emphasis is always on proportion. You drink to keep pace with the evening, not to lead it. Service feels like hosting rather than serving; staff move with the ease of people who want you to stay as long as possible. And you do. Hours pass unnoticed because the room teaches you to listen differently — not for climax, but for continuity.
Step back out into Zürich’s clean streets and you feel the contrast. The city moves on schedule; Kasheme moves on groove. For those who understand, it is one of Europe’s key listening rooms, proof that sound can build community as surely as any civic institution. It is a living-room temple, and in Zürich, that balance of intimacy and ambition feels rare, and necessary.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
