About

Modern Silent Cinema is the electroacoustic experimental music platform for guitarist, pianist, and composer Cullen Gallagher. Begun in Orono, ME in 2004, Modern Silent Cinema has been based in Brooklyn, NY since 2005. As of December 2025, Modern Silent Cinema has released 35 albums and EPs, including original scores for six feature-length contemporary films and over a dozen early cinema silent shorts.

Gallagher's guitar work takes inspiration from psychedelic rock guitarist Michio Kurihara and lo-fi recordings by K. Yoshimatsu, Sebadoh and Sun City Girls, as well as modernist classical guitar composers Leo Brouwer and Toru Takemitsu, and cinematic soundtracks and library music by Alessandro Alessandroni and Daniel J. White. In recent years, Gallagher has expanded his composing and performance into piano, inspired by impressionistic piano works by Erik Satie, Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, Bohuslav Martinů, and Frederic Mompou. These primitivist-tinged piano works are collected on the on-going Passages album series. 

Gallagher's personal statement: "I started Modern Silent Cinema in 2004 as a stop-gap between bands, intending just to record a few guitar chord progressions so I could practice bass. Outside of a few stray songs for bands where I wasn't the primary songwriter, this was the first time that I was truly in control of the music I was making. This is what made me realize that I not only love playing music—but that I love making it, from conception through performance all the way to the mixing and final release. There's a hand-made sensibility that is crucial to my practice as a musician and artist. There's no such thing as a typical Modern Silent Cinema album. The Anxiety of Indolence is more post-rock; Flesh Mother explores noise, feedback, and metal abstraction; The Passion Killer Whose Prison Romance Set Off a Scandal is sort of punk-surf; and Ghost even includes vocal ballads (even silent pictures learned to talk). The one constant in MSC is its growth." 

Selected press quotes:

• "Tingling and tapping, Modern Silent Cinema elicits strange sounds, changing from simple rhythms to contemplative feelings, from melancholic, ostinato plonking to tinny clangs, unafraid of dissonance, Ross Bolleter sounds, ghostly glitches, or whirring interference. But with two handed  catchy melodies, these homemade DIY sounds consciously play with the charm of the imperfect, the all too human."—Bad Alchemy

• "Cullen Gallagher is a tremendous and unique scoring talent. He works like a master prose writer that surpasses narrative for that deeper cut."—Mitch LeMay, KFJC 89.7FM

• "Between avant-garde and neo-classical...always searching for sounds and motifs that can be found outside the beaten tracks, sometimes pushing the piano off a cliff as it were, and capture its final notes before it gives out completely. He can be gentle as well, serving up incidental music a la Zbigniew Preisner or Erik Satie."—Hans Werksman, Here Comes the Flood

• "The perfect lo-fi rainy day disc."—Arcane Candy

• "Beautiful sounds, both raw and polished... There is a feeling this is a lost Fahey or Basho recording."—Lost in a Sea of Sound 

• "Reverberates, resonates and shakes to a range of psychedelic, post-rock, krautrock, scuzz and fuzz influences across a myriad of soundtrack-like instrumentals."—Monolith Cocktail 

• "From quiet, forlorn electric guitar and bass duets to solo heavy electric guitar riffs. From bluesy workouts to distorted yet melodic songs that strongly recall the likes of Roy Montgomery."—Arcane Candy

Modern Silent Cinema is published by CBG Music Works (ASCAP) and released by Bad Channels Records.

Contact: modernsilentcinema@gmail.com

Substack mailing list: Flitcraft Follies

Linktree for all my projects: https://linktr.ee/cullenbgallagher