Martina Castro

Eighty-five percent of San Francisco's water comes from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir. San Francisco Proposition F calls for the city to begin evaluating the option of draining the reservoir. Before the Hetch Hetchy Valley was flooded, or the O’Shaughnessy Dam was built, environmentalists led by John Muir put up a big fight to keep it protected.

LitQuake and the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts present an evening with novelist Daniel Alarcón and the team behind Radio Ambulante, the new Spanish-language podcast based here at KALW. Join us for a special night of live bilingual radio, featuring stories from Latin America and the U.S. moderated by Oscar Villalon, ZYZZYVA's managing editor. The event is on Tuesday, October 9th, and begins at 7pm. Advance purchase is recommended.

Zoe Keating's unique style of music has gotten her to the top of the iTunes classical and electronic music charts, and all the while she's remained an independent artist. KALW's Martina Castro went to talk with her at her home studio about how she experiments with the sound of her instrument.

All the music in this story was performed live during this interview. And it was all performed by just one woman, her cello, and her laptop.

Zoe Keating is walking me around her house. We're looking for woodpeckers.

Local musician Kelly McFarling wrote her song “Atlanta” as an ode to her hometown, but she didn’t write it – or any other song, as a matter of fact – until she settled into her current home in San Francisco. In this edition of Bay Area Beats, McFarling tells KALW’s Martina Castro why she credits San Francisco with helping her launch her musical career, and better understanding the idea of home.

Antarctica is officially the coldest, windiest, and driest continent on Earth. At almost one and a half times the size of the United States, 98% of it is covered with thick sheets of ice. With a landscape like that, it seems like it would be a pretty quiet, lifeless place, right? Well it’s not.