Behind the Cover: A Conversation With Can and Lalin
In a world saturated with spectacle, Can Yıldırım and Lalin Mercan turn the volume down to reveal something deeper. The second issue’s cover is a listening device, tuned to the ambient frequencies of a continent in motion. Built from field recordings across Asia, the design invites us to sit with the unnoticed, to find form in background noise, and to trace the constellations hidden in quiet.
by İzlem Arsiya
The second issue’s cover drifts into view like a low, layered hum. Ambient at first glance, textured on closer inspection. Designed by Can Yıldırım and Lalin Mercan, it carries traces of faraway places and overlapping rhythms: the sound of a baseball stadium in Gwangju, a pedestrian signal in Tokushima, dogs barking in Ayutthaya, a gold market in Dubai. All recorded across Asia, these fragments became the foundation of the artwork. Each tone, texture, and color maps a different frequency of human life, forming a visual field shaped by sound.
Each Centre cover is shaped by a different artist or design duo. For this second issue, we returned to Can and Lalin, who also designed our debut cover, for a work where sound and noise formed the conceptual ground.
The idea for the cover began to take shape in Lalin’s home studio in Erenköy, not long after the duo had wrapped their exhibition süperendişe. What started as a joke between friends on a summer night in Büyükada turned into a full-scale show in the raw, makeshift rooms of an artist-run space in Cihangir. The exhibition explored how anxiety threads itself through everyday life—how it gets encoded in architecture, surfaces, behavior, and design.
The atmosphere that followed was one of lingering questions and unresolved tension. It stayed with them in the weeks after the show and found its way into the early stages of the cover. Sitting with what remained, Can and Lalin began working with sound as both concept and material. Field recordings from across Asia became their raw data. Two ideas framed their approach: the signal-to-noise ratio, a way of measuring clarity within chaos, and Büyük Gürültü, or “The Big Noise,” taken from Ahmet Güntan’s Parçalı Ham, which imagines the world as an endless hum of overlapping human activity. From that tension—between control and excess, decoding and drifting—the cover took form. What began as background slowly came forward, eventually becoming the surface.
Field Recordings Included:
1- National Traditional Music, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
2- Vietnamese women talking in bus, Dong Thap, Vietnam
3- Environmental recording, Ulaanbatar, Mongolia
4- November demonstrations, Bangkok, Thailand
5- Metro interior, New Delhi, India
6- Waves at the waterfront lookout, Punggol Beach, Singapore
7- A monk strikes two wood blocks to demonstrate the peculiar echo in the hall, Tochigi, Japan
8- Motorshow, Tokyo, Japan
9- Announcements at the station, Doha, Qatar
10- Gold market, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
11- Birds at the Temple of Heaven Park, Beijing, China
12- Office ambiance, Beijing, China
13- Typhoon thunder near window, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan
14- Forest ambiance, Miaoli, Taiwan
16- Baseball stadium, Gwanju, Korea
17- Pedestrian crossing signal, Tokushima, Japan
18- Khustai National Parc, Arkhangai, Mongolia
19- Shore ambiance, Issyk-Kul, Kyrgyzstan
20- Festival Folk Song, Bumthang, Bhutan
21- Menu announcements of a restaurant in a
crowded street, Jessore District, Bangladesh
22- Dogs barking, Ayutthaya, Thailand
23- Unsheate sword, anime sound, digitally produced
24- Anime style sound effect, digitally produced
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