"Toni, we've got a situation…" A line often heard in house-music club Lola's four year history. One situation was a naked woman sat spread-eagle on a couch receiving cunniliungus from a gentleman down on his knees, in a packed club. Another situation was waiting in the bathroom. When co-owner Toni Aparasi pushed his way to the front of the long queue, he found a guy passed out on the toilet, half-naked and shitting everywhere. Finally after slapping him in repeatedly in the face for minutes, the guy woke up and was carried out. "I thought there was a dude who died shitting in my club," said Toni.


[Lola partner and resident DJ Toni Aparisi]

Somewhere between posh Bund clubs like Bar Rouge and underground lairs like The Shelter, Lola is Shanghai's nice-but-not-too-nice, not-cheap-not-expensive, uber-Euro destination for house, disco, and techno in a comfortable, un-grimey location. Here's a short list of who's played there: Josh Wink, DJ Hell, Ellen Allien, KiNK, Move D, Pete Herbert, Eats Everything, Mr. C, Axel Boman, Skinnerbox, Super Flu, and Trickski. In 2013, they did 90 international bookings. For the 2-0-1-4, they're already at 65.

I asked them to describe the sound of the club with three trax, and they instead said to choose three of the sixty live sets they've recorded and uploaded to their Soundcloud. Let's start with this recent live hardware set by German duo Skinnerbox…



We can thank the European financial crisis for Lola. Co-owner Xavi moved here when it hit Spain. He sold his restaurants there and packed for Shanghai. Back in Spain, his old neighbor Willy Trullas Moreno told him to come check out Shanghai and do some business. Toni arrived earlier, studying in Macau and helping Spanish companies get started in China, which eventually slowed down as well. Both had DJed for over 15 years and run clubs/nights in Spain. They wanted to open a European-style club in Shanghai. It took about a year from idea to execution.


[Lola co-founder, partner, and resident Xavi [right] and manager/resident Alecs Marta]

In the beginning Lola was a cocktail bar with some dancing, not a club. They even served food. Lola naturally became a club, probably because of the sound system, which is arguably the best in Shanghai. The well-tuned Funktion-One system makes Lola one of the only places in Shanghai where you can feel the bass slam but still have a conversation on the dancefloor. It's warm. In fact, the sound system made up 30% of the clubs total investment. The investors were like "guys, this really doesn't make sense…" but the dudes know that sound is the most important aspect of the club.

International bookings dominate most nights at Lola. It's one of the harder clubs to get booked at, with a strict emphasis on quality control, though they do work with a select few promoters, like Holly Sh*t, TICT, and Colors by HUNT. Toni says "We are three resident DJs. It doesn't make much sense for us to book someone to do a warm-up, if we're already three residents. We book with a lot of time in advance, because we try to get flight shares [with other clubs in Asia]. We're fully booked until January. A lot of people try to get a gig three weeks in advance. Obviously, we're gonna say no because we're fully booked. You can't favor everybody. You've gotta make choices."


["...Once you enter my house it then becomes OUR house and
OUR house music!"]

Lola does almost everything in-house, from music residency to design, whereas a lot of clubs in Shanghai push this on promoters. "We like to be in control, the design is really important for us. We have a clear identity. We believe nobody can do what we do better. We decided that since the beginning."

Some people, including myself, have wondered if the amount of international bookings in Shanghai lately takes away attention from locally-based DJs, producers, and promoters doing cool shit here. Toni says, "Well that is true, but that's the job of those people to do. When TICT throw a party with David and four local DJs, they have a crowd because they do their job and they have their attention because the deserve it, and they work fucking hard for it. If you wanna get their attention, you have to work really hard."


["I'll house you." DJ Mau Mau dropping heat at Lola]

Does Lola manage to break even or make a profit on the massive amount of bookings they do? According to them, generally yes, due to cover charges and power of negotiation. "Thanks to us doing this for four years, the DJs and the agents want the DJs to play here, and the fees go way lower. We have power of negotiation now. In the beginning it was like, 'who are you?' and now [the fees are] like 30-40% less than anywhere else." Josh Wink, who normally commands something like USD 15,000 to play at festivals, specifically asked to play at Lola because he heard the club was dope. They've got Chicago-house legend Derrick Carter coming up next month, and this resulted from a show a few months ago with Carter's friend James Curd, who called Carter in Chicago from Lola saying "man you gotta come play here."


["I can't kick this feeling when it hits..."]

If there's any easy criticism to throw at Lola, it's that it's too European. Too laowai. I asked why Lola don't do any promotion in Chinese, like translating their party descriptions, and Toni said "We are not a club that Chinese people feel very comfortable in. The layout of the club, the dance floor is half of the space. All the marketing and promotion is done by us, and we don't have any Chinese person doing that. We get a lot of Chinese customers at the beginning of the night. If you come here at 11pm, 90% of the people are Chinese, but from 1am-5am, 85-90% of the people are foreigners, so no wonder we get that reputation." Xavi says, "the idea of Lola was open a European club like the clubs we used to play in, in France, Germany or Spain. Two days before we opened, I said this could either be very successful or it could be a fucking disaster."

Dada, Arkham, and The Shelter are all dance floor-focused clubs too, but they manage to pull a much larger Chinese audience. To this, Toni says "They get the cool Chinese crowd. We never got that crowd, and maybe an answer is [that] you cannot be everything." Admittedly Lola's crowd is a bit more mature than Arkham's. Toni also observes, "Something that is really beautiful in Shanghai, that doesn't happen in any other big city in the world, is that different promoters and different communities help each other. I've played in most of the clubs in Shanghai, and there's not that much tension or fights between promoters and clubs. And that's very pure and that's the way it should be. If you go to Berlin, who plays here doesn't play there. In Madrid, where I lived for five years, I only played in one club. In Shanghai, I came here and within two months I was playing in so many different clubs. It's a city that invites."

Not everyone is friendly though. One Thursday, Charp from Holly Sh*t was playing, and a group of local kids came up during the warm-up set and said "Hey man, change the music! Play something high!" This happened repeatedly until one dude came up and said "change the fucking music now!" Charp pushed him out of the booth and a gang of girls at their table started throwing glass bottles at the DJ booth. One bottle hit Charp in the head. Now Lola has bouncers every night.

Here's another live set from the club, this one a live, interactive set by Bulgarian producer KiNK. During this set, he had drum pads and keyboards that the audience could touch and control to change the sounds.



How have they managed to stay successful in a place where bars come and go just as fast as the people? Doing something that no one else was doing, and their big network and group of friends. Xavi mentions the yearly renovations that keep the club looking fresh. Also, the size of the club -- if you get 80 people there dancing, it's happening. And the terrace. Location. Repeat customers who have shown up night after night for years. Above all, the consistency of the bookings.

Lola's been successful, but they won't expand anywhere else in China because their team is small and "China is difficult," not to mention rapidly rising costs on everything from rent to experienced, English-speaking bartenders. They say costs in Shanghai are similar to Barcelona, which is still in crisis mode. Expat salaries are going down, and expat-package laowai have been dwindling for years, supplanted by a stream of creative-industry expats that command lower salaries than the trading/finance expats that used to throw down their 8–10,000 USD/month salaries without care.

Instead of expanding to Beijing or Chengdu, Lola may soon open a second branch club in Bali. Next year, Toni will move to San Antonio with plans to throw Lola parties in Austin and Los Angeles. They're also about to drop their first Lola Trax vinyl release with worldwide distribution, with three or four more on the horizon.


[Looks empty, but the ghosts - they be dancing]

Not everything has worked out so well for Toni, Xavi, and the other partners. They tried to open another bar, Lolita, only to discover that the previous landlord had sold the space with a fake license, then escaped, and the new owner didn't know the place couldn't have a restaurant license. Lolita never opened. A small tapas restaurant they had, Pepito, closed because of a crazy neighbor who would dump water and trash on guests on the terrace from her apartment upstairs. Sometimes she would come beat the terrace umbrellas with a big wooden stick. She had the crazy eyes, and absolutely could not be reasoned with. The landlord wouldn't help, and eventually sued them. Videotapes of the woman throwing items and going crazy did nothing to help, and they lost the court case. Now the space hosts a cafe, opened by the landlord. Another of their restaurants, Loco, didn't work out as planned but they managed to sell it.

Despite these setbacks, Lola is a success, and the dudes love their work - bringing the artists they like and the people they like to come and dance to tunes on the best sound system in town. Four years is a long fucking time in Shanghai. Congratulations to them.

***

Lola has a lot planned for their four-year anniversary, with Brandt Brauer Frick on Friday, October 18 and Art of Tones on October 19. Then on the big anniversary weekend they've got Pete Herbert playing back-to-back with Dicky Trisco on Friday, October 24 and Ian Pooley on October 25.

November looks even bigger, with names like Tom Trago and Derrick Carter coming through. Stay tuned...

And here's one more live set...