What demands do we make on those who come to our country looking for shelter, safety, and peace? Why has the (im)migrant become such a contested and conflicting figure of our times when most of us have stories of migration and flight in our own families? While the greatest threats to peace in Europe and the US are from domestic rightwing terrorists, it is the recent migrant populations from countries like Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Iran who are burdened with our suspicion and hostility; a distrust that has been built into infrastructures and institutions like customs, welfare, housing, and education. The marketisation, corporatisation, and militarisation of the asylum and customs agencies have resulted in a cruel, confusing, and punitive system that leaves many people in limbo for years in a country and society that they are unable to fully integrate and participate in. In Northern Ireland, asylum seekers are handcuffed (they have committed no crime) and taken to be detained indefinitely at Larne House, a run-down ex-police station, until the state decides what to do with them. In Ireland, Direct Provision, a system intended only as a temporary measure in 1999, has become part of the permanent (for profit, and very profitable) customs and asylum infrastructure, comprising of disused and crumbling nursing homes, hotels, and holiday parks, repurposed as detention centres.

In Europe and the UK, private companies Spakrab and Verified AB, who specialise in linguistic analysis, were contracted by states to scrutinise recordings of asylum seeker interviews in order to certify that claimants were from where they professed to be from. Using a methodology called LADO (Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin), they mobilised and weaponised Sweden’s former refugee population as a resource of informants to listen to recordings, as well as to conduct interviews themselves. The question being asked was does accent corroborate someone’s claim of national and regional identity? This remarkably unscientific approach led to false and misleading assertions about where analysts thought people ‘really’ came from. In order to counter this, Spakrab and Verified AB bolstered the impressions of their findings by utilising symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet in their reports to lend them an air of forensic unassailability. A Mogadishan accent is considered a legitimate place from which to claim asylum, but a northern Somalian accent is considered to be representative of a safe part of the country, meaning that the asylum seeker can be deported.

Academic linguists argue that the voice is not a bureaucratic document but a biography, and an index of everyone you ever encountered, films and TV you’ve watched, and books you’ve read. In place of a lack of documentation to prove origin - a common situation for those who migrate - language analysis steps in to fill its place. As the artist Abu Hamdan asserts, “The itinerant lives of refugees mean that their voices in particular should not be used as a national identifier”. One can imagine the number of lives devastated and families ripped apart because of this unsound system of classification, sanctioned by governments across Europe, that deports people back to the places they fled from instead of meeting asylum seekers and refugees with humanity and compassion, our default policy in Europe and the UK is one of hostility and incredulity.

Credits: Jamie Thompson - texts, synths, church organ, turntables, mbiras, drum machines, field recordings, found sounds, cassette recorders, dictaphones, whistles; Felispeaks - spoken word and texts; Amy Ní Fhearraigh - soprano and spoken word; Mariam Rezaei - turntables; Catherine Sikora-Mingus - tenor saxophone; Jamie Stockbridge (Taupe) - alto saxophone; Michael Parr-Burman (Taupe) - guitar; Adam Stapleford (Taupe) - drums; Elliot Galvin - piano; John Pope - bass; Steve Davis - percussion and drums; Darren Beckett - drums; Oscar Cassidy - drums. 

Produced and mixed by Jamie Thompson; Taupe recorded at Dystopia Studios, Glasgow by Luigi Pasquini; Dubplates for turntable improvisations mastered and pressed by Stuart Crossland at Vinyl Pressure; Mastered by Rupert Clervaux; Executive Producer Nick Roth for Diatribe Records, Dublin; Artwork by Jamie Thompson; Design by Jamie Thompson + Max Franosch.

Ritual Taxonomy / Sovereign Bodies is available at Diatribe Records