Various - Fully Nowhere: A World Resources Archive Various

World Of Echo is proud to announce the release of Fully Nowhere: a World Resources Archive, compiling material drawn from limited lathe 7” singles and LPs released by the Aotearoa/New Zealand label, World Resources, predominantly across the 1990s. Supplemented by previously unreleased archival recordings, and material drawn from recent sessions, it’s a revelatory listen, a judicious selection of drone, noise pop, fractured electronics and laminal improvisation from the small community of musicians surrounding the legendary Wellington free noise trio, Surface of the Earth, whose membership drove World Resources.

It’s music that hasn’t found its way into too many ears until now. The World Resources catalogue was both small in its number of releases, and miniscule in edition. The lathe-cuts they released, all made in a record cutting studio in the small Southern Alps town of Geraldine by DIY vinyl manufacturer Peter King, typically didn’t make their way beyond a tiny clutch of devoted collectors – if that. It took the re-release of Surface of the Earth’s 1995 double LP, firstly on CD by Bruce Russell’s Corpus Hermeticum, then again on Utech and finally on vinyl by Black Editions, to draw attention to the body of music made by the World Resources crew.

At which point, you may wonder – how to hear this music? The story of the resurrection of World Resources begins, in earnest, with the reappearance of Paul Toohey’s K-Group project in 2017. This, alongside the Black Editions reissue, a small World Resources retrospective exhibition in Hastings, and the subsequent release of contemporary material by Surface of the Earth, K-Group, and Donald Smith’s Destrifan, got things moving. Toohey played a few K-Group shows in Europe in 2019 and 2023, plus an instore at World Of Echo; then there was a Surface of the Earth tour of Europe in 2025.

The plan for Fully Nowhere was hatched around that World Of Echo show in 2023. It has taken some time to come together, testament both to the attention to detail and deep patience that’s typical of everything World Resources. This is music, and art, that has never felt the need to hurry itself; Surface of the Earth’s recordings are known for their glacial pacing and organic development, three streams of guitar tone (and/or electronics) slowly coaxed into juxtaposition.

The real marvel of Fully Nowhere is the breadth of the undertaking and the openness of the music, even though each discrete World Resources release typically explores one space in some detail. It opens with the submerged, indistinct noise of one of Toohey’s solo projects, Gorgecop, the first 7” singles on the label. “They got reviewed by Nick Cain in [NZ fanzine] de/create,” Toohey recalls. “He said they sounded ‘fully nowhere’.” Even this early, you can hear Toohey’s music developing – the first single is a scrum of battered loops; the second, far more enveloping. “It felt like a bit of a breakthrough, less tentative than earlier efforts, and a nod to the German stuff I liked.”

From there, it’s a significant leap into different terrain with Lucky Stars, Donald Smith’s noise pop project. While a few Lucky Stars songs have leaked out during intervening years, via online compilations and the like, it’s a thrill to hear the hermetic melancholy of this music in a focused dose – you can draw some lines between these songs and the Xpressway aesthetic, Shrimper Records, and flying saucer attack, but it has its own, diffident drowsiness.

There are other projects present here, too: Tony McGurk, the third member of Surface of the Earth, contributes four solo recordings as Sewer; two tracks, “Hospital” and “Smell Of A Man’s Room,” were notionally released on World Resources, though as Toohey recalls, the edition of twenty singles “never made it out of his flat.” The two remaining tracks are more recent, one recorded at the Gaiety Theatre in Wairoa. There are also edits from two releases by New Zealand Guitar Orchestra, where members of Surface of the Earth and Dress (a post-Garbage & The Flowers outfit), along with friends, recorded two free noise albums, The Bad Shed and Skoda. Toohey’s second solo project, K-Group, contributes as well, along with a collaboration between K-Group and NZ home electronics pioneer Omit.

Finally, of course, there is the ‘host’ outfit, Surface of the Earth, whose glorious, irradiated, geological drones still feel sublimely oneiric. Hearing this music fall into place, yet still feel wildly out of time, and somehow completely sui generis, it’s not hard to figure why their extant recorded material is held in such high regard. The material here spans decades, from a ‘single edit’ of “Shield”, recorded in the nineties, through to extractions from the trio’s Stepdown Gallery sessions at Hastings Art Centre, in 2024. It’s testament to Surface of the Earth’s intensity and surety of vision that the temporality here is as smudged and eternal as the music.

Fully Nowhere is arranged loosely chronologically and ends with a recent piece from Smith’s Destrifan project. In this way, the archive points onward and outward; this music is far from over, the archive lives and breathes. Listening over and over again to this music, in quiet thrall to its renegade spirit, its documentation of the visions of a tight-knit crew of unassuming artists from Wellington, I keep wondering: How did they do this, and how did they know to do it both so neatly, and yet so organically? Fully Nowhere, now here, is a radiance of tone, a blossom of sound, a haze of days.