“Thank you all for the support, and watching my streams, and bee happy!”—Vadim
Like so many others in New Eden, few around the campfire had ever heard the name Vadim Kheruvimov. Saturday Night Swarm was up to their usual mischief when a link was shared among the fleet. Regardless, it was the ability of Vadim, or ‘the fucking amazing accordion guy’, that ultimately provided an evening’s entertainment depending on who you talk to. Mozg888vadim was streaming his amazing accordion skills in hopes to earn fifty dollars to buy his sister a birthday gift.
When I finally took the bait and started watching the stream, the huge Star Wars nerd in me was immediately snatched up by his rendition of the Imperial March, as well as his incredible rendition of ‘the Cantina song’. With that said, I wasn’t completely captivated until he played a song by request. He was around thirty dollars into his donation target when I started watching the stream, and the money donations were small but coming in fast. Then the requests came, one Goon laying down fifty bucks for a request.
Little Bees was legendary. Straight by ear, and I’ve never seen anything like it. It wasn’t just his rendition of Little Bees though. he really played everything amazingly: Little Bees, Zelda, even that lame-ass Titanic song was still great. After being straight-up goonrushed, the musician held his composure. He handled spitfire requests with ease. He was always happy, throughout the entire stream, stopping to thank us for watching and telling us to bee happy. With each passing song, his donations grew and grew far beyond his original target. Let me tell you, the fifty dollar objective for his sisters birthday present was smashed as soon as he played Little Bees. Either way, at the time of writing, his donations well exceeded four hundred dollars. What his best song of the night was is a hard question. The Skyrim tune was pretty outstanding, as well as Little Bees, and also his personal composition called Crazy Dance.
He was open to most song requests, and I didn’t honestly see many get missed, he took almost all of them, and his stream viewers stayed steady as we sat entranced. While it was utterly entertaining, I’ll admit he did have a direct impact on our game. If you got what appeared to be easy kills in Delve or Fountain today, it is wholly because of this guy. Capital ship defense fleets just stopped saving people – speaking of which, apologies, Shaftmaster Mastershafts of TNT. I totally would have saved you, but I was stuck watching this incredible accordion player. His stream was actually much longer than I thought it would be, and he just continued playing. It’s funny – by now his stream chat looked something akin to Jita. ISK doublers, Karmafleet recruiting, and donations – This appeared to be normal Jita business.
Then he played it, the most fantastic song of the evening. It was hands down the best song of the night by far, which happened to be How to Stay Aligned.
I’m Johnny Crowe, reporting for INN, and all I really have left to say Accordion Fleet is Best Fleet.
[Editor’s Note: Vadim has put the full version of Little Bees up on Youtube, and linked it in the comments]