Sound Club: Now Here is Nowhere by Secret Machines

This is a cross-post from my Sound Club music club, where I regularly share an album for listening and discussion. Check out the club here. Secret Machines were one of the first artists I discovered through the medium of the MP3 blogs — sites like Fluxblog.org that got their start by hosting MP3 files of new music, and talking about them. At the time, these sites seemed too good to be true. Perhaps they were — ironically, whilst music is still abundantly available for free, quality journalism is the scarce resource. Before the age of the MP3 blog, my experience of discovering music typically involved reading about it (in Jockey Slut, Muzik, or The Face), imagining how it sounded, and eventually finding a way to hear it. This often took days or weeks — scouring record shops for vinyl or a CD, or Audio Galaxy for a dodgy MP3. In the case of the latter, I would sometimes get confronted with a file, and then be unsure whether it was even the right thing. I still remember The White…