Greenpot Bluepot was a solo project of American musician Natalie Rose Lebrecht, who is based in New York and subsequently releases albums under her own name. LeBrecht started making remarkable music under the name Greenpot Bluepot in her teenage years. She released "Daymares and Nightdreams" and then a hand-sewn package containing a CD called Warraw, followed by another homemade album called Imagining Weather, and then a single called “Rrrrr.” Occasionally she involved collaborators; for Ascend at the Dead End, LeBrecht brought in Animal Collective’s Avey Tare to mix the album with her. Greenpot Bluepot’s music is built around her voice: a purring, whooping, magnificently imperfect, magnificently assured noise that is LeBrecht’s and nobody else’s. LeBrecht has a deep knowledge of things she cares about: Andy Kaufman, tarot, Michelangelo Antonioni. She’s spent months on end immersing herself in contemporary composition, in corporate life, in the history of palmistry. She spent some time as La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s assistant at the Dream House, their mammoth, long-running drone-and-light installation. For a while, she slept at the Dream House a few nights a week. The songs that LeBrecht’s developed and distilled and edited and reconfigured into Ascend at the Dead End could only have been created by somebody who’s been changed a few times over and is still changing. It’s both Greenpot Bluepot’s liveliest record to date and the most disorienting thing, a party with tiny mutated creatures writhing right under the dance floor. The idea, LeBrecht explains, was to make pop music with the tools of experimental music, or vice versa. (A lot of the album was written in microtonal tunings; some of it was composed over the course of many months; some of it, including the closing “Melting Sword,” was improvised.) As LeBrecht put it, recording Ascend at the Dead End was an attempt to push herself outside her comfort zone.