According to the Minecraft Wiki, the new slogan for the most popular video game of all time is “shape your world”, and that’s exactly what Farheen Khan and Ginger Scott of MGNA Crrrta did.
Meeting at 11 years old on a Hunger Games roleplay Minecraft server, before then starting their own Divergent-themed one, Farheen and Ginger have long been collaborating and building their world.
Now based in New York City, the electro-pop duo are touring across North America, Europe, and Oceania, as their pulsing beats and euphoric vocals hook listeners into their iridescent girl-world, or as Ginger puts it, “fab and exciting and cute and gorgeous” sounds – words that could be fittingly bedazzled on a hot pink Old Navy tee or inscribed across a justgirlythings post.
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All of this can be traced back to the making of their track The American Experiment together as college students, in Farheen’s bedroom.
“The first song was kind of funny,” recounts Ginger with a laugh, “cause I had the melody for [it] saved on like a random GarageBand project from high school.”
After Ginger showed it to Farheen, they proceeded to tweak it back and forth, figuring out the music-making process as they went. “I feel like it doesn’t really make much sense, but we were just having fun with it,” Farheen tells me.
When asked about their roles in MGNA Crrrta, Ginger expresses that she is more responsible for the production and melodies, while Farheen is stronger at coordinating the visuals behind each song. As for their aesthetic influences, Farheen shares that there’s no strict answer as inspiration can be found everywhere. “People honestly get pissed off at us for having no strong visual. We’ll be like, ‘Water. The vibe for this is water.’”
Having recently moved to New York, the pair quickly made it their home. “I came from a really small town in South Jersey,” explains Ginger. As a trans artist, she says she’d never have had the same opportunities creatively or with her identity if she’d stayed in her hometown.Describing the town as “trashy”, Ginger bemoans the difficulties of growing up as the odd one out. “I definitely feel like it was fate for me to end up in New York.”
Originally from metropolitan Seattle, Farheen fondly recalled herself “trying to LARP as how Seattle was in the ’90s and 2000s, cause that was the last time it was cool.”
Farheen points out that “being a teenager in a place where there’s just nothing, you’re so in touch with everything you feel”. Cut off by stifling towns and chasing a bygone coolness, Farheen and Ginger, like many others in their generation, turned to the internet for solace.
“[The internet] basically made our music,” says Ginger half-jokingly.
“This is a little bit pathetic, but a lot of our growing up experiences happened online.”
For Farheen and Ginger, the pop princesses of the 2010s were a defining feature of their childhoods. “I was the biggest Nicki Minaj fan ever,” gushes Ginger. “When I was watching the VMAs in 2014 and Nicki Minaj did the Anaconda performance and then Bang Bang with Ariana and Jesse, I felt a chakra opening up from my body at that moment. And then I just became obsessed with pop music.”
“On this six-hour road trip, all I had on my phone was Kiss Me by One Direction, Your Love Is My Drug by Kesha, and then the Your Love Is My Drug Minecraft parody in a playlist,” Farheen tells me. “I just listened to them the whole road trip. So now when I hear Your Love Is My Drug, I get kind of nauseous. I just remember being car sick.”
Farheen also lists Five Seconds of Summer, Panic! at the Disco, Green Day, My Chemical Romance and Blink-182 as early influences before her introduction to electronic music.
Towards the end of our call, Farheen shows me a waterfall poster from Temu that hangs opposite her bed – an image she feels captures MGNA Crrrta’s aesthetic. Squinting at the pixilated blur on my laptop, I can barely make out streaks of blue, white and grey. But as I crane my neck, I realise that maybe the desire to manifest a utopian vision from crackly glitches is fundamentally reflective of MGNA Crrrta’s philosophy. By mish-mashing niche samples, esoteric lyrics and infectious riffs, they’re macrodosing emotion, just like how a Yankee Candle will always be more evocative than the real thing.
MGNA Crrrta is playing at The Industrique on 22 August.
