X Way Vis­ion is a video of live per­form­ances by artists from the Duned­in-based Xpress­way record label. Per­form­ing artists include The Dead C, Alastair Gal­braith, Plagal Grind, Chris Heazle­wood & Greg Cairns, Shayne Carter, and Chug.

Screen­ing at the Film Archive, Wed­nes­day 27 May at 7pm. Tick­ets $8/6 con­ces­sion.

[Read more after the jump]

Xpress­way was a Duned­in-based record label that in the words of it’s founder Bruce Rus­sell provided a “life­boat” for a col­lec­tion of loc­al rock and exper­i­ment­al musi­cians. Des­pite being unwanted by oth­er record labels in New Zea­l­and many of the artists on the Xpress­way label would later come to be inter­na­tion­ally recog­nised as the defin­ing acts of New Zea­l­and under­ground music in the 1990s.

X Way Vis­ion was shot at the Stu­dio 13 and Super 8 ven­ues in Duned­in from late 1991 by John Har­vey. Just as these groups were – and remain – out­side the recog­nised defin­i­tion of New Zea­l­and music these per­form­ances were shot in ware­house spaces that oper­ated as altern­at­ives to bars and reg­u­lar ven­ues. A hall­mark of all of the per­formers on the Xpress­way label was the fore­ground­ing of per­form­ance over com­mer­cial pro­duc­tion val­ues, and the film sticks closely to the same for­mula, using a max­im­um of two cam­er­as and min­im­al effects. The cam­era had pre­vi­ously been used to shoot the TAB pho­tofin­ish in horse races.

X Way Vis­ion fea­tures the fol­low­ing per­form­ances:
Gate – Cropped Sil­ver Hi-Lo
Peter Jef­fer­ies – Dif­fi­cult Days
Chug – Ooz­ing
Sandra Bell – Dreams of Fall­ing
Chris Heazle­wood & Greg Cairns – Surf Shitty
Cyc­lops – Steel White Bed
Alastair Gal­braith – Hux­ley
Son of a Gob­lin – Trav­el­ling Grave
Shayne Carter Big Band – Big Fat Elvis
Plagal Grind – Scream­ing E
The Dead C – Helen Said This

New Zea­l­and Film Archive media­theatre
cnr Tarana­ki and Ghuznee Sts
www.filmarchive.org.nz