Eric Phillips is a composer for film & interactive media

ABOUT

Eric began his career moving out to Oregon and 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-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

Eric is somewhat of an explorer by nature and has spent long stretches deep in the wilderness of the American west as well as Ecuador, Brazil and Southeast Asia. He has relatives scattered from Oregon to Mississippi to Maine and writes music inspired by these landscapes, by history, and by his love for friends and family. Classically trained and self-taught in equal measure, Eric crafts emotionally intimate scores for a character driven films, environmental docs and and story-driven games by self-producing novel performances from his ever-expanding collection of instruments from around the world, from 1920s-era guitars to waldzither, pump organ, charango, autoharp, banjo, Rhodes, ngoni, gusli, dobro to tape machines and spring reverbs. Always empathetic and attentive to the subtleties of the narrative on screen, and always emotionally immersive.

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 more uninhibited experiments. 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 Paris: Texas, Clair Obscur, Lincoln in the Bardo and Pluribus.

  
    FULL CREDITS

    FILM

    Sidequest (2026) (short) — Composer

    Abril (2026) — Composer's Assistant

    The Doghouse (2026) (short) — Composer

    Damien & Michael (2025) — Composer

    A Simple Machine (2025) — Additional Music

    The Zebra & the Bear (2024) — Composer

    The Palestine Exception (2024) — Composer

    Polk County (2023) — Composer

    Covenant of the Salmon People (2023) — Composer

    Atomic Bamboozle (2023) (short) — Composer

    Tongass Roadless Protections (2023) — Composer

    The Holdovers (2023) — Composer Assistant

    Working: What We Do All Day (2023) — TV Series — Additional Music

    The Ghost (2021) (short) — Composer

    The New S-Class (2021) — Composer

    Look Away, Look Away (2021) — Composer

    Charming the Hearts of Men (2021) — Composer Assistant / Copyist

    12 Mighty Orphans (2021) — Additional Music

    Negrón: A Tennis Short (2017) (short) — Composer

    To the Edge of the Sky (2017) — Composer Assistant / Orchestrator

    Back to Love (2017) — TV Movie — Composer Assistant (Transcription)

    From the Ashes (2017) — Composer Assistant

    The Lears (2017) — Composer Assistant

    Booyaka!! (2016) (short) — Composer

    Fallout High (2016) (short) — Composer

    Ryder and the Elephant (2020) — Composer

    Chehalis: A Watershed Moment (2020) — Composer

    Myosotis Love (2020) (short) — Composer

    The Last Shift (2020) — Composer Assistant / Copyist

    Necessity: Oil, Water & Climate Resistance (2020) — Composer's Assistant

    The 11th Green (2020) — Composer Assistant / Copyist

    Giants (2019) (short) — Composer

    Our Bodies Our Doctors (2019) — Composer

    Elsewhere (2019) — Composer Assistant (Uncredited)

    Here Awhile (2019) — Additional Music / Composer Assistant

    Use Me (2019) — Additional Music

    Sunset Over Mulholland Drive (2019) — Composer Assistant / Copyist

    Jim Allison: Breakthrough (2019) — Composer Assistant / Copyist

    One Life to Give (2018) — Composer

    The Reluctant Radical (2018) — Composer Assistant

    Into the Woods (2013) (short) — Composer

    Life Sentences (2013) (short) — Composer

    Mastodon (2013) (short) — Composer

    A Flight of Fancy (2012) (short) — Composer

    At My Fingertips (2011) (short) — Composer

    Swimming Pool (2011) (short) — Composer

    The Burtons (2011) (short) — Composer

    GAMES

    LORT — Additional Music

    Pond Water — Composer

    Reindeer! — Composer

    Dear Felicity — Composer

    Will You Snail — Mixing, Production, Sound Design

    Oscillarium — Composer

    THEATER

    The Cortége (2025) — Composer

    PODCASTS

    Medal of Honor: Stories of Courage (2024) — Pushkin, Composer

    Dreamtown: The Story of Adelanto (2023) — Crooked, Composer

    The Superhero Complex (2023) — Composer

    Project Unabom (2022) — Pushkin, Composer

    SYGNYL (2021-2022) — Composer

    The Line (2021) — Apple, Additional Music

    Wind of Change (2020) — Crooked, Composer

    The Fighty Pucks — Novel, Composer

    Death on the Farm — BBC, Composer

    Dear Felicity — Bad Robot, Composer