Slowing the City: Unkompress and Kreuzberg’s Cult of the Pause
By Rafi Mercer
New Listing
Unkompress is one of Berlin’s most respected listening bars — explore more in our Berlin Music Venues guide.
Venue Name: Unkompress
Address: Solmsstraße 30, 10961 Berlin, Germany
Website: unkompress.de
Phone: N/A
Spotify Profile: N/A
You don’t stumble into Unkompress. You arrive there. Purposefully. Kreuzberg’s late afternoon light falls against the cobbled streets, and from the outside, the building offers almost nothing by way of invitation — just a muted sign, the kind that feels like it’s been there far longer than the truth allows. Inside, the city exhales.
The Japanese influence is immediate but never ornamental. There’s no over-reliance on aesthetic cliché; instead, it’s all in the discipline. Tables are low, wooden, unadorned. Chairs are placed for sightlines to the turntable. Shelves hold records, not décor, and each spine is aligned as if in deference to what will follow. Even the air has weight here — the kind of stillness that makes you aware of your own movements.
By day, it’s a tea house. The matcha is whisked slowly, the sencha poured with deliberate rhythm. You could, if you wished, sit here for hours without a word passing between you and the person behind the counter, and still feel completely seen. This is a place where presence matters more than noise.
Come evening, the tea caddies are tucked away and the record sleeves emerge. Jazz, ambient electronica, sometimes the playful intrusions of tropicalia — all from vinyl, all through a hi-fi system clearly chosen by someone who understands the tyranny of the wrong tweeter. The volume is perfect: full enough to surround you, never enough to push you out.
The name — Unkompress — says it all. In a city where even silence can feel compressed by the urgency of what’s next, this is an act of resistance. No playlists. No streaming algorithms. Just the warm, imperfect truth of grooves cut decades ago, played through air you can almost touch.
One evening I watched as a guest — alone, coat draped over the back of her chair — closed her eyes to a Bill Evans trio record. The clink of glassware from the bar fell away, the track unfurled, and for those few minutes, the room was one person wide. That’s what this place does: it reduces the scale of the world to exactly what’s in the air between you and the speaker.
It’s tempting to compare it to Tokyo’s kissaten, and there is that lineage — the reverence for vinyl, the seating that faces the sound rather than the street. But Unkompress is also entirely Berlin: unhurried without being passive, sharp-edged in its clarity of purpose, gently rebellious in choosing listening over chatter.
If you come here expecting entertainment, you’ll leave unsettled. If you come expecting communion — not with other people necessarily, but with sound itself — you’ll leave full. The city outside will still be moving too quickly, but you’ll carry a little of this slowness with you, like steam rising from the last sip of tea.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
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