Download: Manifesto Festival: J Period and Black Thought Live Mixtape

Toronto’s Manifesto Festival is hands down one of the worlds best events, hip-hop or otherwise, and they proved it during a rare event featuring J Period and Black Thought. You might remember the photos and video that our Toronto affiliates took last month and now we have the live 30 minute audio assault, which paired Thought freestyles over J Period instrumentals for a live mixtape. Check it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Beautiful Photos by Philippe N, aka Star P. Please support.

Before Reflection Eternal hit the stage on Sunday, Toronto MC Tona performed giving the crowd some of his grimey, Detroit style flavor. DJ Scratch of the Roots was a highlight, his beatboxing/sampling/drum kit mashups got everyone energized. Afterwards Torontonian Colin Munroe did a set, perhaps best known internationally for his Remix of Kanye West’s Flashing Lights entitled I want those flashing lights that went viral in early 2008. The pop singer/producer came out hard but the crowd didn’t seem to be too hyped. Maybe it was just too pop…

After tons of delay and much anticipation for Reflection Eternal (not to mention some technical difficulties), Hi-Tek finally emerged on stage. It was kind of surprising that nobody cheered for him at all during the 10 minutes that he was up there doing a sound check (show the DJ some love!), but Talib was obviously what people were waiting for. Talib’s lyricism was mad impressive as always, he spit through some hot new Reflection Eternal tracks off of their up and coming album Revolutions Per Minute (no release date yet), and classic tracks like The Blast made the show. It was obvious that they hadn’t played together in a while though, and they seemed out of sync at points with Hi-Tek abruptly stopping the tracks out of unison and Talib looking back at him in confusion.

The show ended with a performance of the obvious crowd pleaser Get By. It honestly was not the hardest hitting rendition of the song, but it did the trick nonetheless.