And in a place like Hounslow, where passenger jets pass overhead every few minutes, peace of mind is vanishingly hard to find.
That’s the most immediate lesson of Outsidergrad, The Battleground’s latest foray into sonic publishing, which documents the soundscape in the wake of Europe’s busiest airport.
“Nowhere in London sounds quite like Hounslow,” the liner notes begin. “That is, if you can hear anything at all.”
A collaboration between Editor-in-Chief Joel Schalit and longtime contributor Duncan Simpson, this strangely hypnotic record draws attention to the interstitial nature of existence in that beleaguered borough, as residents do their best to live normal lives in between bursts of extreme volume.
“In a migrant neighbourhood lined with Halal butcher shops and kebab takeaways, where you can overhear everything from Dari to Romanian, the contrast can be shocking.”
Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to ignore discomfort, provided they are sufficiently exposed to its source. As the figurative use of the terms “mute” and “tune out” demonstrates, excessive noise provides the template for this filtration process.
At the same time, working around a problem is fundamentally different from dispensing with it entirely. In other words, even if the residents of Hounslow stop consciously acknowledging the roar of jets, they are still hearing it.
It would be a stretch to say these unfortunate people can transmute this constant irritation into pearls. But there is a poetic analogy between the global networks of trade and travel facilitated by airports like Heathrow and the multicultural communities that contend with the collateral damage they cause.
While the fortitude of these residents is worthy of admiration, there are other lessons to learn from Outsidergrad.
The liner notes conclude by stating that, “it’s important to listen to where we live.” The record is an invitation not to tune out or press the mute button, not only in places like Hounslow, where simple conversations are difficult, but wherever technological advances have intruded on our everyday lives.
In the early stages of the pandemic, people kept remarking how much more they could hear of the natural world after the sudden decline in traffic. Even the residents of Hounslow would have noticed a difference, since air travel dropped precipitously.
Yet even that interlude of comparative quiet did not diminish the constant humming that defines our electrified world, the sound we are most adept at tuning out, precisely because it almost never stops.
That’s why power outages are so jarring now. We suddenly become aware of all the mechanical sounds we have learned to ignore.
The second track on Outsidergrad documents the sounds of a tube station when a train arrives. Over and over again, we are enjoined to “mind the gap”.
For those who live in or work in London, this exhortation has become second nature, to the point where they rarely acknowledge it consciously. For tourists, by contrast, or people who listen to this record, it’s downright iconic, one of the most vivid reminders that one is spending time in the capital of the English-speaking world.
Within the context of this album, however, this directive assumes an allegorical function. Yes, there’s the physical gap between the train cars and the platform. But there is also a figurative gap that we must heed.
“Mind the gap” reminds us not to forget the distinctions between involuntary hearing and active listening, between suffering and numbness.
Later on the album, we hear other prime examples of content that overexposure can lead us to tune out: a Muslim call to prayer; a religious song by proselytising Christians; the Human League’s pop classic “Don’t You Want Me, Baby”; and the disturbing sound of a woman being arrested.
By extracting these sounds from the fabric of daily existence and presenting them in this format, Outsidergrad encourages listeners to pay closer attention to the soundscapes they know best.
Although I understood this intuitively the first time I listened to the record with my good headphones, it wasn’t until I had it playing on my car stereo as I drove around my home in Tucson, Arizona, with the windows rolled down that I fully appreciated the power of these field recordings.
I kept doing a double-take, struggling to determine whether a sound was coming from the album or from my surroundings.
Was that jet sound from a Heathrow-bound flight or one headed to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base? Was that low rumble coming from a train on the London underground or the underside of my car? Was that sound of anguish coming from the apparently drug-crazed individual ranting in the median on Speedway or the woman heard on Outsidergrad’s final track?
These are all sounds I hear regularly as I drive around town, but have learned not to register. Only with the help of this record was I able to consciously acknowledge them again.
Awareness is a worthy goal in and of itself.
Before The Battleground began publishing, I collaborated with Joel on another DIY internet magazine we gave the unusual name Souciant. The idea behind it was to push back against the pressure to produce easily digestible content that demanded little of its readers. Instead of projecting a carefree, insouciant vibe, we wanted to signal that we cared a lot, maybe too much.
As a series of traumatic personal and political experiences has subsequently taught me, though, the demand to be vigilantly “souciant” sometimes runs aground on human nature.
Anthropologically speaking, both our bodies and minds are operating with outdated programming.
Our senses are meant, at their most basic level, to keep us safe. They warn us of potential threats and help us find sources of sustenance. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the input they provide in our world today doesn’t fit easily into either category, at least not in a way that makes sense from an instinctual standpoint.
In the modern world, there’s almost always a surplus of sounds for the mind to sort through. While it might not be possible to completely suppress a loud sound that is getting in the way of what we are listening for, the mind’s powers of filtration are impressive.
Thinking figuratively is an evolutionary adaptation, helping us perceive threats mediated by culture.
These are almost always threats that did not exist prior to the first civilisations. Frequently, they came into being so recently that our grandparents first experienced them as grown-ups.
Before the late 1950s, no one had ever heard a large passenger jet passing low overhead. Since then, it has become second nature to those who live near airport flight paths or travel by air. That doesn’t mean that our bodies have caught up with this new reality, however.
For a split second, before our reason takes over, they react as though we have sensed the rumble of an earthquake or tsunami. But our minds must translate that instinctual response into something that enables better risk assessment, recognising that the sound does signal potential danger, but in a more specific and less personally affecting way.
What the tracks on Outsidergrad brilliantly communicate is how deafening sounds come to function allegorically, as a reminder that the global travel they facilitate also exposes us to potential danger, but in a different way from the immediate threat we experience when confronted with otherness face-to-face.
The challenge is to strike a balance between doing our best to ignore these sounds and being overwhelmed by their full intensity.
A repressed fear can do a lot of harm. But so can fear that is indulged without literal or figurative mediation.
When field recordings are curated and produced as well as they are on Outsidergrad, they can not only educate listeners about their largely unconscious mental filtration process. They can also help those listeners to reconstruct that process rationally, making it possible to care more productively.
Mastered and sequenced by Raz Mesinai. All rights reserved.
