Subtitled "The Special Schizophrenia / Alternate Realities" issue, Cyber-Psychos #6 from 1995 once again beefs up the page count and jumps further into the deep end of the underground. One of the best issues in the run, in my opinion, with some major names in 90s counterculture and extreme art populating these pages. Oh boy, let's dig in. The feature stories include some of my favorite writers / musicians / publishers ever, so the interview / articles are a complete home-run for me. Sailing gets into it with cult ritual industrialists / erotic button-pushers Sleep Chamber, while Amey Mazurek talks with Australian avant-industrial legends Severed Heads. There is a really interesting interview with the mysterious underground small-press author Uncle River conducted by Don Webb, followed by a new original short prose piece from River. The highlight for this issue for me, though, is the extensive interview with horror/fantasy author Brian Hodge (Nightlife, Deathgrip, Dark Advent), whose work in the Dell Abyss series is some of the best gonzo-horror of the early 90s; this guy is gifted and fascinating, and Sailings interview is one pf the best Hodge pieces that I've come across. A must-read for any devotees of the now-beloved "Paperbacks From Hell" era of the publishing industry. Another standout is R.N. Taylor's interview with Feral House mastermind Adam Parfrey (Apocalypse Culture) which offers a great snapshot of the early days of this lauded publisher of the profane and the arcane (as well as great gardening texts, in more recent years!). Oh, and there's a then-timely article with Hakim Bey on "The TAZ And You" by Bruce Young.

The fiction selection is wild, and continues to skew towards the cutting-edge and/or controversial. Gary Lynn Morton's "Number Of The Beastlies" is tongue-in-cheek dark speculative fiction. And that killer Hodge interview is enhanced with a new short "The Meat In The Machine". "Cyber Stalker" is a nasty bit of hacker fiction. K.K. Ormond gets transgressive with her gender-bomb "Sex, Lies & Derelict Dicks". Opening with a quote from the band The Misfits, David Kramer's "Lonesome Soul" delves into one man's labyrinth of insanity. Lorin Emery's "Saddle Blues" considers the risks of techno-erotic prosthetics. Edward McFadden's "Focal Point Of Disaster" delivers proto-bizarro science fiction. On the non-fiction end, R. Nicholas Taylor discusses psychonautic discoveries and first-hand experience with "Death And The Psychedelic Experience" , and there's a neat artist profile on cyberpunk surrealist Alex Seminara and his unearthly mechanoid illustrations, with several eye-popping examples of his work, which brings to mind a punk-art cross between Escher and Giger. Splatterpunk surrealist T. Winter-Damon does a lengthy review of Bruce Boston's Stained Glass Rain: A Novel Of The Sixties. Experimental and subtly nightmarish visual poetry by Mark McLaughlin. Gnostic poetry / magick from Don Webb. A smattering of lines from Wayne Sallee, Bruce Boston and Tom Hamill (Sailing really doesn't let any of the zine's layout go to waste).

Sailing's "Editorial Babble" kicks it all off in feral form. The "Band Profiles" section covers self-publishing bands like gothic oddball Child, eclectic musical alchemists Cotterpin, and experimental electronics trio Hernia Retraction Accordion. A new column is introduced called "Personal Realities" that features various writers from the Cyber-Psychos orbit like Rev. Chris Korda, Guy Adams, Paul Campbell, and Don Webb, producing short essays on consciousness, musical interactions with LSD, concepts of reality, and the "eco-euthanasia" proponents of the early 90s. "Two Headed TV Casualty" stays up late for 1969's dinosaur/cowboy classic The Valley Of The Gwangi, Japanese cyberpunk avant-horror classic Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and more. The mag's regular coverage on Colorado-based fringe artists continues with "avant-pop" author Mark America, who I know from a couple of great novels on the Black Ice Books imprint. The latest "CyberCents" column further explores the field of do-it-yourself psychotronic warfare with some nuts-n'-bolts info on, uh, low-grade explosives. S. Darnbrook Colson keeps interrogating horror as a presence in everyday life with this ish's "Bad Boy's View". And again, reviews upon reviews that offer insight into the coolest shit that was happening in '95: album reviews of PBK, Vidna Obmana, Unsane, a bunch of Century Media death metal, Charnel Music releases, Muslimgauze, Psychic TV, Greg Ginn's Gone, Fields Of The Nephilim (!) and Melt Banana and a shitload more ; live show reviews of Christian Death, Hawkwind, and King Missile; experimental video compilations; underground lit and art books and extreme horror from Edward Lee and Robert Deveraux, and a bunch of Black Ice avant-lit titles; substantial zine reviews from across the cultural sub-terrain; underground comics, and even some nascent internet newsletters get a look. Cap it all off with more weird comic strips and Brian Cooper's ongoing psychotic punk episode Nymph. Just like every other issue of Cyber-Psychos, it is impossible for me to read through all of this and not jot down another enormous list of esoteric stuff that I now want to track down. Oh, and the assorted ads from tiny businesses in the fields of the occult, goth subculture, extreme music, taboo sexuality, experimental horror, punk lit, etc. A total time capsule.