Rumori S is a stencil variant of MuirMcNeil Rumori, a reconstruction of the wood type used as titling on the front cover of ‘L’Arte dei rumori’, a Futurist manifesto based on correspondence between Luigi Russolo and Francesco Pratella in 1913 and published in Milan three years later.

Based on the 10 titling characters surviving on the front cover of Russolo’s noise manifesto, the design of the Rumori typeface is not a revival of a historical form in the traditional sense but more of a speculative reinvention.

When research into the origins of the original wood type shown on the cover proved fruitless, MuirMcNeil drew on studies of a range of grotesque and gothic display typefaces from the period as key points of reference for the missing characters.

Rumori S extends this speculative approach in a set of bold stencil letterforms without a historical model but conforming closely to the original Rumori contours and with deference to Futurist sensibilities. Rumori S also references the model of several pioneering modernist alphabets created in the early twentieth century in which letters were broken down into minimal sets of basic components that could be redistributed, repeated, scaled, refelected and reformed to build complete alphabets.