Nowhere in London sounds quite like Hounslow. That is, if you can hear anything at all.

On the landing approach to Heathrow Airport, every five minutes or so, descending passenger jets sonically obliterate everything in their path.

For residents of the borough, the interruptions are a feature of everyday life. Conversations are meant to be held indoors, not in the street.

For visitors, particularly to Central and West Hounslow, the noise can be jarring. Even for a loud city like London, it’s hard to imagine living with the brute force of such noise.

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.

Brief moments of relative silence give way to intense moments of detail, revealing a highly multicultural area obscured by airliners arriving from overseas.

It’s a remarkable metaphor for today’s United Kingdom, riven with conflict over immigration. But it’s an equally important lesson in the sonic signature of community.

In Outsidergrad, Battleground Editor-in-Chief Joel Schalit and longtime contributor Duncan Simpson offer a portrait of Hounslow as they hear it, in all of its urban glory.

Recording everything from train sounds and street musicians to passenger jets flying overhead, the thirty-two—minute record is a landmark work of city field recording.

The album’s dénouement, a nearly six-minute-long account of a woman being arrested amid a mix of intense jet and traffic noise, is a wake-up call about London’s inequalities.

Outsidergrad was recorded in the Summer and Fall of 2023 and slowly tinkered with over the next two and a half years. No overdubs or mixing were done with the field recordings.

The work consisted of selecting the most representative pieces out of several hours of material and spending a great deal of time editing and processing the best parts.

The result is a record that’s both journalistic and artistic, as much preoccupied with tonality as it is content. This is what Britain sounds like and why it’s important to listen to where we live.

Produced by Joel Schalit. Mastered and sequenced by Raz Mesinai. Cover design by Philippe Nicolas.