Blank Comrade are: Sean Watson, Alastair White & Shoubhik Bandopadhyay.

The band are the founding members of the Edinburgh based 5-piece White Heath, who are signed to the esteemed Scottish label Electric Honey.

Blank Comrade was set up to showcase the trio's earlier electronic work and their ongoing experimentation in this genre.

I have had the two CDs of Sean’s and Alastair’s early work for a few years now. When I received the first, I was sceptical to what I was about to hear, but was taken by surprise … yes the levels were all over the place, there were messy bits of overloaded distortion and generally gave the impression that there was quite a bit of tidying up to do, but as the tracks progressed none of this mattered, and what came out of the speakers was music to my ears. The ideas and dynamics, the go-for-it approach, the instrumentation, the fearless and erratic arrangement of each song was refreshingly new, daring, and immediate in its impact. I was particularly drawn to the use of vocals and the balance and integration within the arrangements, where they adopt an instrumental identity rather than the ubiquitous and conventional up-front vocal and instrumental backing.

After a lifetime in and around the music industry and having become numb to the never ending cart loads of re-shaped, re-fashioned, re-visited, and regurgitated plagiarisms from the musical mountains of the past’s ‘golden age’, hearing their work was an absolute  delight … not quite all of it, but most of it.

A CD 'If there is hope...' containing selected tracks from their early work has been published and released as digital downloads and will be available through all the major and lots of minor download stores by the end of January 2010.

John Smith was asked and has generously created the artwork for the album 'If there is hope...' featured on this page.

Graham Bowers 2009