Active as an engineer, producer, and musician across four decades,
Max Loderbauer first came to notice in the late ‘80s as a member of
Fischerman’s Friend. Known then as Daimler Max,
Loderbauer’s associates included Stephan Fischer and
Tom Thiel, as well as producer
Thomas Fehlmann. Once the group went dormant,
Loderbauer and
Thiel established
Sun Electric; one of the leading sources of entrancing downtempo and ambient techno through the ‘90s, the duo issued their best work on R&S subsidiary Apollo, including the 1995 live set
30.7.94 and the following year’s
Present. During the 2000s and 2010s,
Loderbauer collaborated in numerous settings, including
NSI with
Tobias Freund,
Chica & the Folder with
Paula Schopf, and
Moritz von Oswald Trio with
Vladislav Delay and
von Oswald.
Loderbauer was partly responsible for some of the most progressive and experimental electronic music released during these years. In 2011, he and contemporary
Ricardo Villalobos assembled
Re: ECM, a project that involved radical transformations of
ECM label recordings by the likes of
Bennie Maupin, Christian Wallumrød,
John Abercrombie, and
Arvo Pärt. ~ Andy Kellman