Eric Phillips is a composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist originally from Massachusetts. After studying scoring for film at NYU, he moved out to beautiful Oregon and began the working with veteran composer Mark Orton, best known for his long-standing collaboration with legendary auteur filmmaker Alexander Payne (Nebraska, Oscar-winning The Holdovers). Since then, Eric has composed music for numerous feature films, documentaries, shorts and video games. Recent credits include Higher Ground and Concordia Studios’ Netflix docuseries Working: What We Do All Day starring Barack Obama, Crooked Media’s Dreamtown (Tribeca 2023), Jan Haaken’s award-winning documentaries (Including Our Bodies Our Doctors), and the feature film 12 Mighty Orphans. He also assisted on Payne’s Oscar-winningThe Holdovers. Eric has also written music for major podcasts that have won Emmys, and Ambies for folks including Bad Robot, Crooked Media, Spotify, New York Times, Pushkin, Apple, Pineapple Street and more.
In parallel with his scoring work, Eric performs and releases music under the moniker Kennebec, a genre-defying cinematic chamber-folk ensemble serving as a creative laboratory for Eric’s most uninhibited ideas. Through Kennebec, he has collaborated with modern indie, jazz, pop, and classical luminaries including Samuel T. Herring (Future Islands), Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Sudan Archives, Yazz Ahmed, Alfa Mist, and Joe Armon-Jones. He has also shared stages with Arooj Aftab, Kevin Morby, Joep Beving, and Minus the Bear, and performed at festivals such as PDX Jazz and South by Southwest.
Eric Phillips writes music shaped by landscapes, history, and family. An explorer by nature - Eric has spent long stretches deep in the wilderness of the American west as well as ecuador, brazil and southeast asiaand has relatives scattered from Oregon to Mississippi to Maine. These experiences have taught him how a place sounds and what communities hold. Classically trained and self-taught in equal measure, he came up producing and performing with his own experimental groups, Eric moves fluidly between crafting thematic scores for a large orchestral ensembles and self-producing novel performances from his ever-growing collection of instruments from around the world, from 1920s-era guitars to waldzither, pump organ, charango, autoharp, banjo, Rhodes, ngoni, gusli, dobro, and tape machines.
Outside the studio, he likes to spend his time hiking, collecting field recordings and testing new ways to make his partner Emily laugh. Recent favorites have included Paris: Texas, Clair Obscur, Lincoln in the Bardo and Pluribus.
