In this technological age, plagued by phone addiction, it is easy to forget that sometimes the algorithm shows us delightful things. As a case in point, some months ago, while wasting time on Instagram, I found a funny video about urban planning by an account called Pondless.

This wasn’t wholly unexpected. You see, since reading The Power Broker nearly a decade ago, urban planning has been at least peripherally among my interests. And it so happened that, upon moving back to my native land, I found myself in a relationship with an aspiring urban planner. Whether I liked it or not, urban planning was thus becoming a big part of my new American life. 

At the end of the video, the long-haired, deadpan protagonist hinted at the fact that he made urban-planning related music. This was intriguing. The idea of music about this arcane subject struck me as full of ironic potential. And he had a concert coming up.

So it was that, a month ago, I found myself in Wonderville, a bar in Bushwick. After ingesting an artisanal hot dog and amusing myself with the arcade games, I waited for the main event. To be honest, I was expecting a novelty act—a strange comedic niche that could only be found in deep Brooklyn.

But from the moment that our long-haired protagonist walked on stage—limping, dragging a heavy cape, while his bassist introduced him as the “marvelous magnate of metropolitan matters”—I was electrified. It was clear that I was in the presence of a natural performer.

Better yet, from the first notes struck by the band, I could also tell that this was a group of first-rate musicians. James Paul Nadien, on drums, could play more intricately with one hand than most drummers can with two, while Connor Shann slapped his bass with the vigor of a young Larry Graham. Guitarist Shai Rodriguez, meanwhile, alternated between jazzy noodling, bluesy twang, and distorted rock freakouts. Rounding out the sound was the shimmering tone of the lead singer’s keytar.

What followed was one of the most enjoyable live performances that I have attended in years. Indeed, I was so inspired that I decided to contact Pondless for an interview, to find out more about this odd artistic project. Here is what I found out.

Pondless is the brainchild of Aaron Oliver, our long-haired protagonist. And the path that led him to this point was, in some respects, surprisingly straightforward. Music has been a part of his life from the beginning. Some of his earliest memories are of singing in church; and he started taking piano lessons in grade school. This ultimately led him to study performance at Berklee College of Music.

Meanwhile, he also had a background in urban planning. His father is an urban planner by profession, though Oliver—typical of sons—didn’t become interested until he moved away to Boston for college. A child of Los Angeles, Oliver was struck by the compactness of the New England city. “I’d always loved LA and didn’t see anything wrong with it,” he told me. “It was only when I visited home with my girlfriend, during college, that I saw why it might have problems.”

This led him to pick up Jane Jacobs’s classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and to start following some of the many excellent urban planning channels on YouTube, such as CityNerd. “But what gave you the idea of writing songs about this?” I asked him. “Well, it just kinda happened,” he replied. “I was writing songs, and urban planning was all I was thinking about.”

His musical influences are eclectic. His musical chops clearly show him to be a serious student of jazz. But his tastes reach back to Earth, Wind, and Fire and Talking Heads. He also has a love for electronic music, which is why the Pondless recordings sound so different from the bluesy, rocky live aesthetic.

But is it a novelty act? Oliver has a robust sense of humor, a willingness to be ridiculous, and a healthy appreciation for irony. But the music is not a joke—or at least, not exclusively. “It is both totally silly and deadly serious,” he explained. And, indeed, during his performance, the humor of the lyrics was eventually swallowed up by what was, for me, genuine emotion. It helped me to realize that, for all of its boring bureaucratic detail, urban planning is a vital art.

Perhaps it is Oliver’s background attending religious schools, or perhaps it is his love of Bill Withers and other gospel-influenced singers, but there is a sense of being taken to church at a Pondless concert. The pseudo-organ sound of his keytar, the way that he swaggers and gesticulates, his penchant for bending his voice slowly into a note—all this gives his performances the energy of a televangelist, simultaneously corny and full of fire and brimstone.

And the ideas behind his songs are worthy of this fervor. For it is quite true that so many of our problems stem from the structure of our cities. Air pollution, lack of housing, social isolation, even political polarization—these problems are either caused or aggravated by the way we live, sequestered away in suburbs, constrained by our cars, with few spaces to meet and mix.

But Oliver is not pessimistic. “One thing I love about LA is its willingness to reinvent itself. For example, did you know that the city used to have the biggest trolley network in the world?” I did not—but it’s true. “They tore it all down after World War II, which is why the city is the way it is.” But he pointed out that the LACMTA (also the name of one of his best songs) is expanding, and that the upcoming mayoral race has the potential to put progressive Nithya Raman in power. The city might be on the verge of reinventing itself again.

More generally, Oliver hopes that his music spreads awareness of this often overlooked subject. “Science has lots of popularizers, but urban planning is just as important, and it’s so often ignored.” As he points out in one of his videos, the structure of our towns and cities is like water to a fish, omnipresent but invisible. And yet, we built it, and we have the power to improve it. Perhaps that sounds overly optimistic. But it is easy to indulge in optimism when listening to a truly awesome band.