[5] In addition to Lopatin's own singing, the album also features vocal performances from Anohni and Prurient, while instrumentalists Kelsey Lu and Eli Keszler contribute to several tracks.
[5] Influences on Age Of included Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which inspired the narrative of the album's accompanying performance installation and tour MYRIAD, as well as William Strauss's The Fourth Turning, a favorite book of former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, which Lopatin described as "insidious, like the voice of a computer insisting on the truth about history without any sensitivity given to how complex and non-linear systems might be";[3] Lopatin was subsequently inspired to "[use] that sort of taxonomy as a kind of farce to then create these little frameworks for understanding".
[3] Other inspirations included the writings of the 1990s multidisciplinary collective Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and the works of singer-songwriters such as Bruce Cockburn, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon.
[7] Ecco is "a phase of pre-evolutionary ignorance", Harvest is "living in agrarian harmony with the world", Excess is "the age of unchecked industrial ambition", and Bondage is "an era of engorgement, wherein "we keep making more and more shit until there's no space left.
"[8] MYRIAD mainly featured "three-hundred pound sculptures that hang from the ceiling like kebabs that secrete ooze", and a full ensemble that toured to perform songs from Age Of, including Eli Keszler, Kelly Moran and Aaron David Ross.
[9][13][10] The instrumentation of Age Of is made up of MIDI harpsichords, guitars, pianos, brass and vocals, as well as Lopatin's trademark unorthodox sound design, samples and synth presets.
"[9] Ross Devlin of The Skinny, in a five-star review of the record, also highlighted the album's amount of ambition, particularly the "wealth of exquisitely baroque moments, exploring history as a pliable, multi-dimensional rift", that gave it "exceptional sonic depth".