MAO Inhibitors started in Fall of 1981 when a group of creative malcontents and unschooled musicians, inspired by the outsider music of Cabaret Voltaire, Wire, Tuxedomoon, Bauhaus, Kraftwerk, and Brian Eno got together in my grandmother's basement to manufacture an unholy noise with untuned guitars, primitive electronic devices and toy instruments.

The band name is in reference to a class of psychoactive drugs prescribed to a MAO by a quack psychiatrist. It keenly described the music's vaguely political and psychedelic quality, most notably in the early recording "Toeing The Soviet Line".

Fueled by various mood-altering substances, the MAOs would enter into repetitive machine rhythms as if in a shamanistic trance, sometimes for hours on end. Out of one of these trances The Kromedome Saga emerged, a musical concerning a well-meaning but slow-witted young man who toils away in the factory all day and enjoys the company of his zaftig girlfriend during his precious hours of leisure. But Kromedome has a rare and wonderful gift. Oftentimes Kromedome will come under the spell of an enchantress, who bestows upon him beautiful and terrifying visions.

At least that's as far as we got with it, until my grandmother had had enough and kicked us out.

So the MAOs retired to a new base of operations, a garage with carpets on the walls with a vista of undeveloped farmland just outside the garage doors. This suburban desolation changed the music from that of subterranean insects to a more conventional amplifier-driven form of post-punk. This resulted in their first live dates, at the Living Room in Providence and a dance at Middletown High School for unsuspecting teenbops.

The MAOs carried on sporadically despite having members leave town or form new bands, and released occasional recordings, some of which received airplay on WBRU and WRIU. Eventually it boiled down to the two original members, still carrying the torch, at Maohaus Studios, located again in a basement, but this time with Pro Tools instead of a 4-track reel-to-reel tape recorder.