Eric Phillips is a composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and educator originally from Boston, Massachusetts. He began his career working under veteran composer Mark Orton in Portland, Oregon, best known for his long-standing collaboration with legendary auteur filmmaker Alexander Payne (Nebraska, The Holdovers). Since then, Eric has composed music for numerous feature films, documentaries, 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, and the feature film 12 Mighty Orphans. He also assisted on Payne’s Oscar-winning The 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.
Drawing from both classical training as well as his time producing & performing with his own experimental groups, Eric moves fluidly between crafting character driven 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.
In parallel with his scoring work, Eric releases music under the project name Kennebec, a genre-defying chamber-folk and cinematic 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.
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 The Studio, HollowKnight: Silksong, Lincoln in the Bardo and Paris: Texas.
