If I learned anything from my most recent list-making exercise, it’s that my knowledge of 1980s music lacks depth, despite my attempts to expand beyond staples like R.E.M., The Smiths, Pixies, and U2. I spent the decade playing with Legos, not buying indie LPs, so I’ll excuse my deficiencies. Muxtape #2: “Making the Body Search” is comprised entirely of songs from that decade, a few of which I’ve only recently stumbled upon. I’m keeping artists to one appearance on this Muxtape series, so no Colin Newman or Wipers, although Newman’s “Ahead” from Wire’s The Ideal Copy provides the subtitle.

1. Cocteau Twins – “The Spangle Maker”: Considering that I can rarely make it through a whole Cocteau Twins album in one sitting, I’ve been listening to them an awful lot lately. Every release seems to have a handful of gems that plead with me to keep listening, keep checking out more Cocteau Twins LPs, and I have complied.

2. For Against – “Shine”: If you had asked me to guess where For Against originated, I would have answered, “Some industrial town in England.” I would not have guessed Lincoln, Nebraska.

3. The Feelies: “Slipping into Something”: This song is the highlight of their 1986 album The Good Earth, which I covered in Record Recollection Reconciliation. It starts off slowly enough, but when the guitars pick up it nearly runs off the rails.

4. Mekons – “Empire of the Senseless”: I never knew what to make of the Mekons when reading through Touch & Go / Quarterstick catalogs back in high school so I stayed away from their expanding hoard of releases. But after including the enticing Fear and Whiskey in the last round of iPod Chicanery, I gave The Mekons Rock ‘n’ Roll a listen and was even more impressed. Tracking down their multitude of LPs could keep me busy for a while.

5. Elvis Costello and the Attractions – “New Lace Sleeves”: I purchased Trust on LP back in high school when Mark / Western Homes heralded its greatness, but I’ve kept to edgier efforts like My Aim Is True, This Year’s Model, and Blood & Chocolate in spite of Trust’s lingering presence in my collection. The soul-inflected “New Lace Sleeves” caught my attention, however, so I’ll have to pull out that dusty LP soon.

6. Brian Eno & Harold Budd – “Not Yet Remembered”: From their acclaimed collaboration, Ambient II: Soporific Boogaloo.

7. Killing Joke – “Unspeakable”: Most fans prefer their 1980 self-titled debut, but What’s THIS For...! took their tribal drums, razor-wire guitar, and bellowed vocals to stranger, more apocalyptic places.

8. Comsat Angels – “Eye of the Lens”: Sleep No More is a great slab of post-punk, but it’s even better appended with post-album singles “Eye of the Lens” and “(Do the) Empty House.”

9. The Dead Milkmen – “Big Lizard”: I can only assume that my selection of Big Lizard in My Backyard for 1985 was the most curious choice on my recent list (“better” records from Hüsker Dü, The Meat Puppets, Mekons, The Pogues, The Replacements, and Tom Waits simply don’t have the necessary playtime for me to choose them), but I have nothing but fond memories of dubbing Dead Milkmen cassettes with friends in middle school. Even with a line like “And you should see the way it shits,” “Big Lizard” isn’t as juvenile as the rest of the album. It comes rather to melancholy for a song about the military blowing up a kid’s pet lizard.

10. Minutemen – “West Germany”: I owe my breakthrough on this record to Michael T. Fournier’s book on Double Nickels on the Dime in the 33 1/3 series. Go buy it!

11. Ultramagnetic MC’s – “Kool Keith Housing Things”: I almost forgot to include any ’80s hip-hop, but Kool Keith’s original group makes the cut. He stresses the second-to-last beat of most lines on Critical Beatdown, but he certainly kicked the habit by his mid-1990s records as Dr. Octagon, Dr. Dooom, and Black Elvis.

12. Hüsker Dü – “You Can Live at Home”: The final song on their final record is a Grant Hart mega-jam.

I have created a New Artillery Muxtape, which I’ll try to update every month or so with different songs. I’ve written about half of these bands a considerable amount in the last few months, so hopefully your interest is piqued. Many of the other selections are precursors for future posts. Muxtape #1 is subtitled “Now come days of begging, days of theft,” which is the first line of the second chapter of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The novel has little to do with 1980s post-punk, American indie rock, or melodic electronic music and most of the songs lack insights into the American West in the middle of the nineteenth century.

1. Four Tet – “Hands”: I picked up Four Tet’s Rounds from the dollar bin of Reckless Records in Chicago a few years back. Although I was both surprised and delighted to find a recent, critically approved release in said bin, I put off actually listening to the album until “Hands” and “My Angel Rocks Back and Forth” came up on shuffle in my iTunes. Since then, Rounds has been in heavy rotation on my laptop and in my car stereo. The gentle pulse of “Hands” is still my favorite part of Rounds, which outdoes most of the organically inclined entries into the IDM wing of electronic music.

2. Colin Newman – “& Jury”: I’ve already written about my fondness for Colin Newman’s solo work, especially 1980’s A–Z and 1982’s Not To, which come closest to Wire’s art-punk. If you enjoy Wire’s first three albums or late ’70s and early ’80s post-punk and haven’t heard these records, track them down as soon as possible.

3. Frank Black – “Places Named After Numbers”: I remember seeing videos for Frank Black’s “Los Angeles” and “Men in Black” on 120 Minutes and taping the songs onto an audio cassette, but I never followed up on either record. Hell, I hadn’t gotten into the Pixies at that point. By the time I felt compelled to check out Frank Black’s solo albums, he already had far too many of them and I tossed off the whole enterprise. Whoops. Frank Black and Teenager of the Year have been making the rounds in iTunes lately and while both records could use some editing, gems like “Places Named After Numbers” make considerable sense in a post-Trompe le Monde context.

4. Accelera Deck – “Guided”: I first learned of Accelera Deck’s Narcotic Beats through Epitonic.com a year or so after its official release in 1998. At the time there were few, if any acts combining electronic beats and shoegaze guitar this effectively, so it’s a bit ironic that Chris Jeely abandoned this sound before its true emergence with M83, Ulrich Schnauss, Guitar, and similar new-gaze artists. Narcotic Beats may sound a bit dated nowadays since it’s not as polished as the aforementioned acts, but it’s hard to top the lilting melodies of “Guided,” “Greentone,” or “Drifting Out.” A career recap of Jeely’s output is long overdue, but if you ever come across Narcotic Beats or Exhalera Deck’s “Exhale” / “Inhale” LP, buy them and thank me later.

5. Smog – “Say Valley Maker”: I was officially chided by a friend of mine for not including A River Ain’t Too Much to Love on my best of 2005 list. My only excuse was that I was still digesting Smog’s Doctor Came at Dawn, Red Apple Falls, and Knock Knock and wanted to pace myself on Bill Callahan for a while. River now threatens Knock Knock for my favorite Smog LP and “Say Valley Maker” competes with “River Guard,” “I Break Horses (Peel Session),” and “All Your Women Things” for my favorite Smog song. I could quote every line from the song, but “And there is no love / In the unerring,” weighted with its extra syllable and fully breaking the rhyme of the verse, surpasses my other potential examples.

6. Wye Oak – “I Don’t Feel Young”: Wye Oak’s If Children comes together so strongly that it was hard to extract a single song to sample. While the guitar rush of “Warning” and the melancholic ache of “Family Glue” make solid cases for inclusion, the rising melody of “I Don’t Feel Young” grabbed me on the car ride back from New York this weekend.

7. C-Clamp – “Land Meets Sea”: Whenever I miss driving down I-57 to or from Chicago and passing a golden haze of nearly unbroken cornfields—yes, I actually enjoyed this drive—I think of C-Clamp’s guitar distortion and how perfectly it fits that mental image. “Land Meets Sea” adds an underbelly of acoustic guitar and an array of electric arpeggios to that distortion before pairing its closing feedback with descending harmonic chimes. It’s a multi-tracking extravaganza, but it’s handled with a remarkable amount of subtlety. I wish C-Clamp had recorded a third album, but Meander + Return and Longer Waves combine for a strong, if underappreciated legacy.

8. Silkworm – “Cannibal Cannibal”: Firewater will get its own post in the near future, but it took all of my strength not to put on one of Andy Cohen’s cathartic, solo-laden epics (“Slow Hands,” “Tarnished Angel,” “Don’t Make Plans This Friday”) in the interest of this mix’s pacing. Tim Midgett’s “Cannibal Cannibal” is much closer to the up-tempo classic rock of Lifestyle, but there’s certainly enough of Firewater’s relentless gravity in the pre-chorus couplet “It takes a lot of nerve / To get up in the morning.”

9. Wipers – “When It’s Over”: “When It’s Over” is a fine example of Greg Sage’s guitar pyrotechnics on Youth of America, an album I’ve covered several times.

10. Stars of the Lid – “Articulate Silences Part 2”: I wish they played Boston every month.

11. Lungfish – “Creation Story”: I have a larger post in the works on the rise in vintage vinyl prices, but Lungfish’s early records are a particularly curious example of inflation on eBay. The band has staunch devotees whose desire for early Lungfish records like Rainbows from Atoms and Pass & Stow has pushed me out of the market for the time being. Sixty bucks? I’ll wait and see if I see them in a used bin, thanks. Dischord did remaster and reissue the former record last year, tempting me to break my “If it’s on vinyl, buy it on vinyl policy,” but I’ve held out in the hopes that my search will bear LP fruit. “Creation Story” limits Lungfish’s trademark meditative repetition to the music, since Daniel Higgs opts for a gloriously rambling alternate take on creation/evolution: “…as a fish realized it held a monkey inside of itself / And expelled it on the beach in a larval, salamander form.” It almost acts as a template for the bizarre world Lungfish inhabits on their later records, particularly Indivisible, The Unanimous Hour, and Necrophones.

12. Deerhunter – “Spring Hall Convert”: Microcastle, Deerhunter’s follow-up to last year’s Cryptograms, magically appeared on the internet far in advance of its release date, but I’m still enjoying its predecessor. I finally grabbed the vinyl pressing of Cryptograms and Fluorescent Grey at Newbury Comics (20% off coupons are the devil on my shoulder) and splitting the album into three sides makes absolute sense.