YOUR WEEKLY TOUCH UP
A live music residency rooted in identity, consistency, and community.
CREATE THE THINGS
YOU WISH EXISTED
Every Wednesday in Braamfontein, something rare happens: a live music night shaped entirely by a community of alternative South African artists, not algorithms. Your Weekly Touch Up is our response to the gap we felt as artists looking for intentional, genre-fluid spaces to share and experience music that sounds like us. What started as a self-initiated solution has become a weekly ritual for both performers and listeners.
Creative Strategy & Purpose
As artists navigating South Africa’s alternative music space, we didn’t wait for permission, we built what we needed. Your Weekly Touch Up was born from a collective desire for consistency, autonomy, and a stage that truly reflected the sounds we and our peers were making.
It started off as a weekly return to performing post-lockdown, but quickly revealed itself as something deeper, a routine ritual where artist and audience meet each other halfway. Strategically, the goal was always infrastructure: something consistent, intimate, and built with longevity in mind. Not just an event, a cultural appointment.
Brand Identity
From its inception, the identity of Your Weekly Touch Up was designed to be both minimal and functional, a system that can adapt as the residency evolves, without ever losing its voice.
The identity was developed with Bar Ber Black Sheep in mind, the barbershop where YWTU was first hosted for 76 consecutive weeks. We leaned into the aesthetic of South African barbershops, particularly the way hairstyles are painted as simplified heads and faces, and adapted that for a music residency, treating each lineup like a new head in the window: familiar, stylised, expressive.
Creative Direction & Design
ByLwansta
Layout Design
Tshepo Mbokazi
Each weekly poster becomes part of a living archive, using a dynamic grid and tight typographic structure to frame the artist’s face in a way that feels bold yet intimate. Our layout works just as well on screen as it does in your hand, instantly recognisable across social media, playlist covers, event flyers, printed table talkers, banners, and even booth branding.
The identity system is robust but generous, seamlessly integrating other brands’ colours and motifs during takeovers (like Spotify EQUAL and Vogue Nights Jozi), while preserving the unmistakable silhouette of a Touch Up poster. It’s clean, consistent, and deeply rooted in the world that created it.
Spotify
Mailer
TikTok
Curation
Our curation goes beyond booking, it’s about context, trust, and care. Every week, the lineup is carefully assembled with a balance of seasoned and new acts, with an emphasis on the experimental, genre-fluid and alternative. We scout the way crate-diggers do: open tabs, Spotify deep-dives, virtual meetings with managers, attending live shows, friend recommendations.
Experience & Environment Design
At its core, Touch Up is about texture. From the moment you enter the space at Mamakashaka and Friends in Braamfontein (once up a time at Bar Ber Black Sheep in Rosebank), the environment communicates its own mood. It’s the low light and deep bass, the smell of someone’s dinner from the back, the soft chatter before the music begins. It’s our stickers in your hand and a familiar face across the room. We think about how the room feels, not just how it looks. The event flows in a way that invites you to stay, to return. And as our home venue changed over time, so did the environment, always keeping the ritual alive while giving each new space a Touch Up of its own.
Production & Execution
Producing a weekly residency for over a year is no small feat, but our systems are built for consistency. We handle the full execution: live sound, artist booking and briefing, artist hospitality, stage design, and on-site coordination. It’s DIY, but never disorganised, we run on intention, timelines, and the muscle memory of 100+ shows.
Community & Cultural Impact
Touch Up has become more than a stage, it’s a platform, a family, and a weekly pulse in Johannesburg’s alternative music life. Regulars arrive early, new artists gain real fans, and people bring their friends like they’re bringing them to church.
What we’ve built is culture-led infrastructure: something that didn’t exist until we made it, and now feels impossible to imagine the scene without. Artists have gone on to collaborate, tour together, and release music they first debuted at YWTU.
