Arcadia was the arty quarter of Duran Duran's side project. Members Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes were left to complete it after Roger Taylor left the group. They still strove to create the "western evocative of east" blueprinted by Japan's Tin Drum. They didn't achieve it with this, but it's certainly the best album Duran never made. Like earlier work Rio, the sleeve perfectly describes the record inside. The opener "Election Day" is darkly romantic irking toward erotic and has brass stabs not dissimilar from their Bond score View to a Kill. The following songs are lighter: "Keep Me in the Dark" and the U.S. single "Goodbye Is Forever." "The Flame" has a sharp beat and sultry bass groove that nods at Nile Rodgers. Two dream works, "Missing" and "Rose Arcana," precede "The Promise," which guests Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, Sting, and Herbie Hancock…

The Italian Steffani spent most of his fabulous career as a composer, spy, and diplomat in Germany, in München and Hanover, with a prolonged visit to Paris to the court of Louis XIV. In terms of the prevalent national styles of music in the late 17th C, Steffani was "all over the place" – his overtures are thoroughly French, his arias sparklingly Italian, and his mastery of counterpoint profoundly German. Does that stylistic Duke's Mixture ring any bells? A certain pair of Germans born in 1685, one revered for his cantatas and the other for his operas, were both indebted to Steffani for his synthesis of Italian, French, and German fashions.