Torazine was the most extreme magazine that has ever been published in Italy.
Born in Rome in 1995 as an offshoot of the local rave scene and fueled by the most rigorous “chemical diet” of the time, for the next seven years it would infest the worst underground nightmares of distorted visions and degenerate accelerationisms, infecting with its “polychrome capsules of pop counterculture” an imagination which, at the turn of the millennium, even risked overflowing into the mainstream.

Covers in which Che Guevara’s face overlapped with Charles Manson’s. Great reports on drugs, acid Marxism, unlikely conspiracies, possessed Barbies and deviant sex. Techno-comics drawn at 180 BPM. Articles praising the extinction of the human race that seem to be written by a sect of possessed Satanists. Bizarre cute incursions with perverse aftertaste. An aesthetic seductive and repulsive, refined and repelling, imbued with the same colors as a carton of spoiled LSD.

It is impossible to underestimate the importance of Torazine in the history of Italian offline publishing: the last chapter of a saga inaugurated thirty years earlier by newspapers like Mondo Beat and then continued with publications like Re Nudo, Frigidaire and Decoder, with its mockingly necrophilic breath the Roman magazine represents the pyrotechnic conclusion of an era destined to be supplanted by the advent of online. At the same time, precisely because of its apocalyptic nature, Torazine was able to anticipate many of the aesthetics that still crowd the online underworld, from the hallucinations of weird/dream/traumacore to the most abrasive forms of dark web meme-aesthetics.

The main reason I’m drawn to this is prolly my fixation on a uniquely Gen Z spiritual decay, finding new food for thought from bored stimulus-seeking intellectual precursors of the past. Old bitches yap about the year’s last few big zoomer shootings with ancient PSA-ass language of extremism and beliefs cuz they’re too detached from the hurricane to see these shooters break from constant online reinforcement of their worst self loathing and impulsive behavior, primal not psychological, ’till they're black nonbinary 764 nazbol groypers or some even more obviously incoherent nihilist shit for no cause, no reason, nothing expressed but filth and rot, everything's fried by AI Trump x Squidward TikToks and prepubescents on Discord grooming each other in circles, now filth and rot is all there is.