Black Flies

Orange Vinyl. All his life, Eddie 9-volt has acted on instinct. Aged just 15, this old-soul artist turned away from the path of college and jobs to burst all guns blazing onto the blues club circuit of his native Atlanta, Georgia. Flash forward to 2019, and for his debut album, Left My Soul In Memphis, the prodigious multi-instrumentalist simply powered up the amps in his mobile trailer and with his brother/co-writer/producer, Lane Kelly, laid down one of the year's breakout releases, acclaimed as "fresh and life-affirming" by Rock & Blues Muse. "Memphis was a total side project," shrugs Eddie, "that ended up taking off."Now, released in 2021 on Ruf Records, Little Black Flies is the 24-year-old's most impulsive move to date. Tracked live in Atlanta's Echo Deco Studios through November 2020, once again with Lane turning the knobs, plus a who's who of the state's best musicians (including guitar icon Cody Matlock), it's an album that Eddie planned to feel like it's unfolding right in front of you - right down to the clink of bottles and loose studio banter. "I've seen a trend in modern recording," he says. "There's no soul. I took inspiration from Albert Collins, Otis Rush, Mike Bloomfield. All those great records were done live with their buddies and no overdubs. I wanted the playing to be spot-on - but even if we made a mistake, we kept going."Little Black Flies represents a passing of the baton to a bandleader that many credit for reinvigorating the South's proud roots scene. Born in June 1996, to a non-musical family living ten miles south of Atlanta, Eddie still remembers his fateful first guitar. "I was six and it was one of those with the speaker in it - get the most bang for your buck, y'know?" he muses. While manufactured pop dominated the airwaves as he came up at Union Grove High School in nearby McDonough, Eddie forked hard left, hanging with Lane and his friends, and digging back into the catalogues of blues giants like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Freddie King and Rory Gallagher. "I studied the older cats," he explains, "saw what made them groove and tick."