The questions started coming soon after David Arkenstone released his exotic debut album, "Valley in the Clouds," in 1987, questions from charmed listeners, critics, interviewers - and the musician himself.

How did he happen to create his distinctive mystical-magical New Age sound? What are the special ingredients, his roots, the secrets of his success?Arkenstone isn't sure he can provide perfect answers.

"It's hard to figure out," Arkenstone admitted in a telephone interview in advance of his May 20 concert in Salt Lake City. He's had to sit back and ponder his personal creative process, going through "a bit of introspection and discovery, asking myself, `Why did I do this?' " And how.

Arkenstone has come to realize that his bold-but-warm instrumental sound is a singular mix of this and that: the British pop invasion of the '60s, the progressive rock of the '70s, movies and many of the more pictorial classical composers.

Arkenstone was born in Illinois, but his family moved to the Los Angeles area when he was 10. "I have very little of the Illinois blood left - I feel like I'm from California." Today he lives in Sunland - just at the edge of the smog, he said - with his wife and three children.

Arkenstone was introduced to the piano as a boy. Today synthesizers and the piano have starring roles in his music, but the multi-instrumentalist also plays guitar, cello, harp, mandolin, flute and pennywhistle, adding dimension and variety to his tunes.

Growing up with the Beatles and the whole rock music explosion of the '60s inspired and turned him toward a music career, Arkenstone said. He was a member of several bands during his high school and college years. His music then, he said, leaned toward progressive rock and keyboard-oriented songs, "somewhere between Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Foreigner and Yes."

His own groups included his final venture of the early '80s - Arkenstone, an eponymous band that was doing moderately well, touring small clubs "across the U.S. and up and down California."

In Arkenstone, he played keyboards, did 90 percent of the songwriting and sang some ("I wasn't the lead singer; that was just too much to handle"), all while trying to rehearse and keep the band together. The group seemed to be his last real shot . . . but just couldn't seem to attract the vital record deal.

The band came apart, but Arkenstone himself achieved success soon thereafter almost out of the blue, in the burgeoning New Age field.

Before about 1985, Arkenstone didn't even know there was such an outlet for musical creativity.

"A friend of my wife gave me a, I think a Kitaro record, and I was surprised that was even on record," he said. Kitaro's evocative pieces weren't alien to him at all - much of what he'd been writing seemed not unlike the New Age music he soon began to discover in the record bins.

"A lot of the songs I wrote I couldn't even use in the rock band, and some friends thought there was a market for it."

He'd made a few tapes of his more adventurous instrumental music for friends and sent some of those off to various record companies.

"Luckily, it came together." Arkenstone's sound piqued the interest of the people at Narada - and that gave us "Valley in the Clouds."

Arkenstone has just released a new album, "Island," with New Zealand guitarist Andrew White in a featured role. The new set of songs is noticeably less mystical, more earthbound than "Valley in the Clouds," while retaining the musician's knack for evoking enigmatic and enchanting places - in this case, islands and shorelines around the world. In showcasing a variety of instruments, the songs seem more akin to the fusion created by fellow Narada artists David Lanz and Paul Speer on their albums "Natural States" and "Desert Vision" than to "Valley in the Clouds."

Besides doing some touring, he's already at work on album No. 3. The next one, he says, will be more of a solo outing, again with the strong presence of percussionist Daniel Chase, who has helped accentuate the rhythm and beat on his first two. He thinks the new work will be even more lush, more daring than Nos. 1 and 2.

"You have to keep doing that," Arkenstone said. "You've got to keep growing."

In analyzing his recent creations, Arkenstone acknowledges his debt to the pop and rock of the '60s and '70s, but also points to his interest in other categories of music, as well.

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"I was always into different kinds folk music," he says for example, and in the works of certain composers: Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Holst, Copland, the piano music of Satie . . . .

"I like the compositional structure of classical music," Arkenstone said. "The symphonies - you can listen to those 20 times and, if you want to, get something new each time."

He is particularly taken with the grand themes and color of much of the music of the 17th and 18th centuries. Then there is the fine music created for the movies of our own time, especially for adventure flicks, by such composers as John Williams. Arkenstone says he really loves that stuff.

"You take all that, mix it up - and it comes out as me," he said.

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