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Arabesque

Arabesque was an all-girl trio at the height of the European disco era in 1977 in Frankfurt, Germany.After the first album, the band lineup was changed by keeping only the original member Michaela Rose and replacing the two other girls with new members Jasmin Vetter and Sandra Lauer. After they split up in 1984, Jasmin and Michaela continued on as the duo "Rouge", while Sandra Lauer started her own career as a solo artist, collaborating with Michael Cretu as Sandra and later as part of Enigma.Arabesque became extremely popular in Japan, and also had a great deal of success in the USSR. In 1980, the single "Take Me Don't Break Me" became a hit, which only scraped the German Top 40. Their next single, "Marigot Bay", would become their only Top Ten hit a few weeks later. Their last singles, "Ecstasy" and "Time to Say Goodbye", became hits only after their split, in various European countries, as they sounded very close to the Italo-disco sound, a very popular music genre on the European dance scene at that time. Those songs spread and gained success through LP compilations of dance/pop music, and bootleg tapes, so, the band could never take advantage of this success, as neither of those songs could properly appear on any music charts as "singles" anyway. (That was a common problem for many '80s European dance artists.) These last Arabesque singles also introduced the "Italo-disco" sound to Japan, under the term "eurobeat", previously used in the UK for the Stock Aitken Waterman productions. That soon lead to Japan's Super Eurobeat music style.TriviaOn 16 December 2006, Arabesque (featuring Michaela Rose and two new members, Sabine Kaemper and Silke Brauner) headlined the second Retro FM festival in Moscow. According to Russian press they are planning a tour in Japan and possibly releasing a new album.In 2009, Fake Blood released the dance single "I Think I Like It" in which he used a sample of the 1979 Arabesque song "In the Heat of a Disco-night".