The long-awaited ninth album, Age of Empire, is a bold, confronting and provocative response to a world on fire, a tragic reflection on the hubris of power and the exile of truth. Crossing the continental fault line between East and West, OSTARA cuts deep into the raw nerve of an era of pain, evoking the cruel lessons of the past to illuminate the fate and fury of today. From the Spanish Armada to the American Civil War, the destruction of Carthage to the twilight of Russia, the besieged Imperium of Germania to the catastrophic rebirth of Europa, this is a folk opus bolstered by military tattoos, choir, strings, lyricism, allegory, drama and a fistful of angst from the Troubadour of Doom. Eleven songs for the eleventh hour hurtling darkly towards midnight, Age of Empire marks two decades of Richard Leviathans journey through myth, history and the liminal nature of the self in the shape-shifting web of reality. Vulnerable and defiant, delicate and harsh, this is an elegy and an ode to the recurring fugue of death and transfiguration, dissolution and consummation.