Jessica Ackerley applied to an Arctic residency on a whim, partly motivated by a childhood spent reading Farley Mowat's accounts of Northern Canada and a long-held desire to reach the polar regions. What they found in Svalbard, Norway — one of the furthest points north on the planet — was almost the inverse of what they'd imagined: the gap between preconceived idea and lived experience became the subject. The island carries centuries of layered history, from fur traders and whalers to coal excavation to current scientific research on climate change, and sits at a geopolitical flashpoint as nations jockey for influence over the Arctic. Ackerley describes their ongoing work rooted in that experience as an attempt to share something most audiences will never witness directly — and to let music do what language can't quite manage: convey the essence of being there, and make listeners question what they thought the Arctic was.

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Hannah Boissonneault describes how her songwriting and concert music practices have become more unified over time — and how improvisation has remained at the heart of both. She shares how voice memos, nontraditional instruments, and a love for slow-moving harmony help her tap into musical intuition. Whether writing a fixed media piece or recording with her band, she embraces the same curiosity, layering textures to create immersive, emotionally grounded sound worlds.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

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Through his Vital Organ Project, composer and organist Graeme Shields is reintroducing audiences to an instrument that’s often misunderstood—or overlooked entirely. He and Tyler talk about making the organ accessible outside of church walls, connecting with new audiences, and showing that this centuries-old instrument still has a vital place in today’s musical landscape.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

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Nicky Sohn traces a real shift in how she lives and works back to meeting her husband Nate, whose ordinary nine-to-five routine — gym at six, regular hours, a clean line between work and the rest of life — struck her as almost unbelievable after years immersed entirely in musician culture, where identity and self-worth get tied up completely in career outcomes. Watching her brother Justin's old nine-to-five (before he left it to become a ceramicist) planted a similar idea: what if composing worked that way too. The bigger realization underneath both is that music isn't life or death, despite what conservatory training can leave people feeling — that a slow commission year doesn't make her a terrible person. She's since pulled back from all-night writing sessions and constant email responsiveness, trying to build in actual breathing room. Marrying outside the music world has helped in another way: Nate offers something composers rarely give each other, plain, unguarded encouragement, alongside occasional outsider feedback sharp enough to be genuinely useful, like noticing that an opening passage didn't sound like a beginning at all.

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Han Hitchen shares how his identity as a queer, transgender, nonbinary man has shaped his music, from early subconscious works to intentional explorations of belonging and transformation. He reflects on the freedom he’s found in embracing both masculinity and femininity, and how composition became a vehicle for expressing identity with honesty and depth. For Han, music is not just notes on a page—it’s a way of making visible the truths of selfhood.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday!

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Michael Frazier outlines three guiding pillars that now shape his creative life: fun, patience, and the embrace of identity. Reflecting on earlier periods where composition felt more dutiful than joyful, he describes how reconnecting with jazz, rhythm, and later his Latino heritage fundamentally shifted his relationship to writing music. Fun becomes not a distraction from rigor, but a necessary condition for sustained artistic investment; patience allows musical ideas the space to unfold fully; and identity offers a source of sincerity rather than constraint. Through recent works shaped by rhythm, dance, and cultural memory, Frazier describes a turning point where composition becomes not only meaningful, but genuinely enjoyable again.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

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Ania Vu discusses The Music She Writes, a project co-created with pianist Eunmi Ko to spotlight the work of Asian women composers. She talks about curation, community, and the power of making space for others — all while resisting narrow definitions of identity-based programming.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

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For Christopher Stark, what makes a residency valuable has little to do with geography. Across stints in Italy, Norway, and upstate New York, location left almost no mark on the work itself — the people did, offering a rare baseline of cross-disciplinary curiosity and genuine attention that felt validating in a way daily life rarely does. Residencies also provide distance: a chance to step outside routine and assess whether it's actually serving his goals. A year in Rome clarified this from the opposite direction — Stark found himself missing the chaotic, diverse American art scene he could move through in a single week, despite conditions he describes as inhospitable to art-making. That contrast extends to artistic community itself: away from home, everyone starts from a baseline of mutual unfamiliarity, but in St. Louis, identity, history, and local politics attach to everything, including a string quartet, in a city with little of the ironic distance found in scenes elsewhere.

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micro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

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