The name is literal: Blain, in the musical scale of C. Two lifetimes of craft meet in it - one spent listening, one spent looking - and both belong to Blain Crellin of Melbourne, Australia.
For thirty years he was the photographer architects called when a building deserved to be seen properly: large-format film, patient light, cities across Australia and China. The music never left - it waited. Since 2021 it has all come out at once: electronic soul and progressive songs, written and sung by a man who spent three decades learning exactly where to stand.
Classical pianoforte and theory. The scale of C, learned by hand, long before it became a name. A mother who painted in oils, a father who engineered bridges - design and perspective in the house from the start.
Studio years in metal - the first electronics. A business diploma in hotel and catering operations at William Angliss College (1985), then a self-built glass-repair business serving the automotive trade. From 1989 to 1991, the 2am to 6am shift as a presenter on Melbourne's Triple R, alongside guitarist David Lazzaro.
Country and lightning blues, played in studios - learning the groove from the bottom end up.
Life drawing with sculptor Paul Juraszek, five years assisting professional photographers including architectural specialist Ian Mackenzie, and a certificate from ACPAC in 1993. Commercial real-estate work for CBRE across Melbourne's CBD grew into commissions from architects across Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. In 1999, Transurban commissioned him to photograph CityLink from first dig to completion - the three-year body of work became the exhibition 'An Urban Road', shown at eight venues.
Twenty-two Australian icons, 26 one-of-one portraits, $80,000 raised for the Salvation Army's Red Shield Appeal. The whole story.
An Australia-China Council artist residency in Beijing in 2002, photographing Australians living and working in China for the online exhibition 'Australians in China'. Then a decade of the construction boom: based in Shanghai from 2005 to 2011, photographing architecture, interiors, hotels and food, with work across the Pacific, Dubai and the Middle East, France, South-East Asia and Hong Kong. On the side, short films in Shanghai with Drago Lazetich as assistant director, cameraman, editor and occasional actor - and conversational Mandarin.
The songbook opens at Beat Tank Studios, Melbourne, co-composed with engineer Benjamin Hense: the EPs and LPs Street Walker, Gravity in Motion and the seven-track Water World, and the singles and remixes between.
The single 'I'm Home (The sky it falls)'. The Interstellar Travellers project with Robodop Snei, named after a line in their song 'Future Plains', and their debut EP 'Still Life'. Slice Records will release the next single, 'Love Ends on Time'. And, because curiosity never retires, final-year university studies in sociology and psychology.
