In a little over a year, Columbus-based producer Maggz has quickly become one of my favorite instrumental hip hop artists. After finishing the run of excellent Soundscapes EPs, he’s right back at it with his full length debut for Feelin’ Music.

What makes Maggz such an intriguing producer is the way he’s able to shift tones and capture different moods within his music. If you spend enough time listening to instrumental hip hop, it’s easy to come across a lot of artists who have only figured out how to make one type of beat, and they just keep coming up with different variations of the same thing. An artist like Maggz, however, is able to effectively take you through a pleasant auditory journey in which you experience a full range of emotions, without drastically changing style or genre. The music can be calm and introspective, with a hint of melancholy, or it can get warm, intimate, and sexy. It can sound bright and hopeful, or it can sound eerie and other-worldly. Other times it can have a nostalgic and soulful bounce to it. It’s really quite remarkable just how effective Maggz is in bringing all these different angles into a short, ten song album, and to make them flow together coherently. I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to this record at this point, but I do know that just about every time I’ve listened to it, when I get to the end, I immediately go back to the beginning and start over again, because I didn’t get enough.

Fragments of Mind is another step in the right direction for one of the best new(ish) artists producing instrumental hip hop today. He’s moved beyond interesting beats and grooves and is really producing music that gets to the core of how people feel, and that is no small feat.