Joel Schalit and Duncan Simpson - Outsidergrad: Hounslow Sessions
- 1Hounslow East to Central Tube Trip
- 2Hounslow East to Central Tube Trip II
- 3Isleworth Window Jet Sounds, Hounslow
- 4Call to Prayer (Boombox Editiion), Hounslow High Street Bus Stop
- 5Hounslow Strip, West End
- 6Walking Hounslow Strip
- 7Christ is Risen, Hounslow town centre
- 8Don't You Want Me, Hounslow High Street Bus
- 9Tabla Player, Hounslow town centre
- 10Two Jets Fly Over Premiere Inn, Hounslow High Street
- 11Isleworth Window Noisy Arrest, Hounslow
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Open edition
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 album 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.
released April 15, 2026
Field recordings by Joel Schalit and Duncan Simpson
Produced by Joel Schalit
Mastered and sequenced by Raz Mesinai
Cover design by Philippe Nicolas
© The Battleground Sounds. All rights reserved.
all rights reserved
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 album 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.
released April 15, 2026
Field recordings by Joel Schalit and Duncan Simpson
Produced by Joel Schalit
Mastered and sequenced by Raz Mesinai
Cover design by Philippe Nicolas
© The Battleground Sounds. All rights reserved.
all rights reserved
