The album saw a refinement of Skinny Puppy's characteristically harsh, mechanical, and sample-heavy sound, with several critics labeling it as the band's best effort.

After Skinny Puppy's first two releases on a label, Remission (1984) and Bites (1985), the band began to hone its messages and focus on social wrongs.

[1] 1986's Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse saw Dwayne Goettel's introduction into the group and marked a shift in Skinny Puppy's sound from dark synth-pop to a more elaborate form of abrasive industrial music.

[4] Dave Ogilvie, who had produced some of the group's previous albums,[5] joined as a full-time member,[6] and work on VIVIsectVI began at Mushroom Studios, Vancouver in mid-1988.

[11] As the band further developed, the idea of life from an animal's perspective continued to come to mind, and VIVIsectVI especially showcased the concept.

[10][12] The album's title, VIVIsectVI, is a pun intended to associate vivisection with Satanism via the roman numerals for 666 coupled with the word "sect".

AllMusic writer Bradley Torreano noted that Ogre was one of the few vocalists in the industrial genre whose voice "sounded poetic amongst the noise and beats".

[24] Alongside Ogre's shouted, enigmatic vocals and the loud industrial sounds, a fretless bass leads the song's groove and eventually gives way to one of the band's rare early instances of electric guitar.

[25] The rest of the song continues to criticize the employment of chemical weapons[26] and is built around a repeating percussion loop broken up with further news sound bites and occasional bass.

[18] This contrast between traditionally upbeat, occasionally beautiful sounds and an oppressively industrial tone is an ongoing motif in Skinny Puppy's music, further heightened by the variety in Ogre's vocals, which go from agonized to manic often in the same song.

[6] The seventh and eighth tracks, "State Aid" and "Hospital Waste", return to VIVIsectVI's harsh nature, with the former ending in the album's heaviest barrage of beats and the latter being built around a propulsive rhythm punctuated with bass and suffused with wailing, superimposed synth patches.

[12][25] The CD version of VIVIsectVI contains an otherwise unreleased track, "Funguss", and three additional songs that are featured on the album's singles as b-sides.

[31] Cofounding member cEvin Key considered these appended songs as a cross between Skinny Puppy's style and that of some of his side projects, like Doubting Thomas.

[34] "Funguss" closes the expanded album, ending with a distorted and downtuned guitar riff reminiscent of those found commonly in heavy metal music.

[20] "The Second Opinion" includes the line "that machine has got to be destroyed" from Stuart Gordon's 1986 adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's From Beyond, and also features the "man of the shroud" sample first used in the closing track "Epilogue" from Skinny Puppy's 1987 album, Cleanse Fold and Manipulate.

[45] Gilmore's friend who worked at the University of British Columbia provided him with a stack of X-ray images bound for disposal, and, with a makeshift light table, he made VIVIsectVI's artwork.

[46] In 1988 when the artwork was created, it was common practice to use large format Hasselblad cameras to take black and white Polaroid test shots of the piece to verify exposure.

VIVIsectVI was followed by a tour of North America that featured Nine Inch Nails, a band inspired by Skinny Puppy,[49][50] as the opening act.

[10][12][54] On October 22, 1988 at Saint Andrew's Hall, Detroit, one of the band's props, Chud (a custom-made stuffed dog fixed with an armature[11][55]), was stolen by a female fan who went backstage after the concert.

[56] After retrieving Chud from the back of a parked car,[15] Key and Ogre explained the situation to the fan's parents, who thanked them for not calling the police.

[52] Additional drama with Chud occurred a day later on October 23, 1988 during a performance in Cincinnati when two[57] members of the crowd believed that the stuffed dog that Ogre was vivisecting was real and called the police.

[59] He later gave an official statement on the encounter: "I find it paradoxical that the police can justify arresting us on the assumption that we mutilate and experiment on live animals for a theatrical performance when the inhuman reality is that it occurs in over 300 laboratories every day.

[8][16] "Testure", released as a single in 1989, was accompanied by a music video that depicted a man (who presumably had been abusing his pet dog) being experimented on by a group of surgeons.

[39][48][53] In his 1988 review, Mark Jenkins of the Washington Post wrote that the album contained the band's "most morose music yet" and commented that the song "Testure" was "characteristically impressionistic but lucidly visceral".