I love podcasts. I listen to, oh, an average of 9 hours of podcasts a day and watch 6 or 7 hours of video casts in a week? I don’t listen to the radio anymore, and I don’t watch much TV at all. That is, if you’re trying to do the math, an enormous quantity of stuff to go through. Throw in the fact that the average podcast will fade eventually, and the result is that I’m always on the hunt for new shows. The thing is, I’m a little picky. Finding that much content isn’t that hard, but finding that much content that’s also to my taste is a different thing entirely, because my taste is a little weird.

As you may know, I produce a podcast called Braindouche!, and it’s kind of all over the map. Sometimes there’s fiction, sometimes music, sometimes it’s me talking, and sometimes it’s “other”. There’s no good place for it to live in the iTunes podcast directory, or any other major podcast directory because they’re all based on the iTunes system of organization. I’m listed under Music, Performing Arts, Podcasting and Personal Journals. Individually, none of those categories fit; collectively it might be close. It’s not a show for everybody. In fact, it was only ever produced with one listener in mind: me. I make Braindouche! the podcast I Want To Listen To ™, so therefore we can assume I want to listen to more podcasts sort of like that.

So, if I want to find more podcasts sort of in the same vein of Braindouche!, where should I look? Do you see where my problem is now? I have a very hard time trying to find the shows I want to listen to. It’s not that I don’t like NPR casts or talk shows or music podcasts or fiction shows or whatever, I do. (For the record, though, I don’t like couple casts. They do nothing for me.) The last time I counted, I’m subscribed to way more than 200 podcasts, and they’re all kinds of different things. At the same time, this is the internet, and I’m actively shaping my media consumption, and I just like what I like, and what I like is just plain hard to find.

So, instead of sitting around and bitching about it on twitter, here’s my solution. I’m going to list all of the podcast I listen to that blow my mind. Then, the little internet elves will scurry about with pingbacks and search engine hits and maybe the Secret Society of Abstract and Experimental Content Producers will call me with the secret password. While that’s chugging along, when I ask the internet for podcast suggestions and the internet asks back “what is it that you’re listening for?”, I can point right to this post and say “Here. These are my favorite shows of all time. I want more of this.”

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Benjamin Walker’s Theory of Everything. It was a podcast, now it’s a blog. It was a wonderfully broken podcast that almost inhabited an alternate reality.

Baron Landscape’s Broken Hours. Take an abstract audio artist and performer and give him a podcast project.

Bell’s in the Batfry. John Bell has never described his show as an audio cartoon, but I would. One part mayhem, one part hijinks.

Catalog of Ships. This show grew out of a performance art series in New York, and plays a large part in the host’s thesis for either his Masters or his PHD. Sadly, it’s faded, and it’s well-missed.

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History. Just to show I’m not morally opposed to the big guys, I love this show too. Nobody does narrative history like Dan, and while he’s far more martial in his topics than I’d prefer, the effect ends up a little psychedelic.

Wiretap. Artistic high weirdness on the radio? In Canada, sure. The CBC still doesn’t podcast this show and I get angry about that at least once a week.

Irrational Public Radio. It’s an NPR spoof, and it’s completely spot on. They don’t release nearly enough.

Joe Frank Radio. Joe Frank is the godfather of slightly skewed audio. Dark, disturbing and entertaining as hell.

King Bonk’s Campfire. A sadly faded cast, King Bonk was an audio producer and composer telling fabulously odd stories and playing music.

Love & Radio. L&R is sort of a sibling show to Theory of Everything. It’s what happens when young NPR producers are under-employed and bored and cracked out on This American Life and a little stoned.

Cyberpunk Radio. It’s a… series of audio postcards… from the other side of the apocalypse… if the apocalypse came about because the internet woke up. Edgy hard brain-scrambling goodness.

Mr. Nice Guy. Marv talks about all sorts of  stuff. It’s good.

Pferdzwackur: The Tin Man. The Tin Man is somewhere between an audiobook and a miniseries, described at the site as “A surreal retelling of the Wizard of Oz, from the Tin Man’s point of view”. This was the first show to truly blow my mind and give me a glimpse of just how limitless this whole podcasting thing is.

Atoms, Motion and the Void. This show has been around for a while, but it’s only recently become a real podcast. Imagine 79-year-old retired actor Sherwin Sleeves sits you down to read you his autobiography, then bank left hard into magical realism and turn out the lights. Fantastic.

Teknikal Diffikuties. While this comedy show isn’t exactly ground-shaking, it’s an interesting view into what happens to screwball Pythonesque comedy when it’s completely Americanized. Mentioned because the host, Cayenne Chris Conroy, is flexible with his format in a way his peers simply aren’t. Also, consistantly funny in a way most comedy podcasts aren’t.

The Halfcast. Horrifically dark comedy and roll-your-own music. I weep every day I wake up and realize this isn’t my show.

OKS Recordings of North America. This is a set of four experimental music podcasts, and by that I mean really experimental, from free jazz to hacked wii-mote circuit bending to recently bit-thrashing samples of people speaking in tongues into drone music. They’re also a record label. Go find one you like and listen.

Mercy Bend. Mercy Bend is a psychiatric institution that doesn’t exist any more. These are the stories of it’s patients. They’re usually dirty.

The Night Air. “The Night Air – listening for pleasure: an audio adventure in which ideas, sounds and music are remixed around a new theme each week.” Fuck This American Life, this is how to do great creative public radio.

The Psychotic Hour. Way-the-hell-out comedy. They know a certain fjord in Norway.

Heat Flash. Imagine you need to write a new dirty story once a week? How long would it take you before your stories got really freakin’ weird? Heat Flash passed that horizon long ago.

Cake and Polka Parade with Fatty Jubbo. All the bizarre audio and music collage you can stand, and it’s on the radio on a major market. It’s not even the weirdest thing on that station.

The Dusty Show with Clay Pidgeon. This is the weirdest show on WFMU, just because it’s a lot less self-conciously weird than the other weird shows on that station. There are interviews, audio collage, production… I can’t explain it. It’s all over  the place and all good.

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So I ask you, what other shows should I be listening to?