Biography
Technical tunes, saturated spectacles, worshipful wordsmithery, and crafty code. Steve Chab writes, designs, and programs music, art, and words because the love of Messiah compels him.
Medium and genre do not limit Steve. His luscious musical compositions draw from emo, prog rock, and abstract hip-hop. His terse poetry and lyrics evoke nostalgia, capture time, and challenge listeners' ontology. He remixes art the way musique concrète samples sounds, manipulating found images into glitchy, colorful patterns. A critic once praised his "subtle obsession with specificity."
Steve performs in the greater Pittsburgh area as part of an indie emo trio, Steve Chab Band. SCB released a debut album titled Broken Images in 2024 followed by a remix album in 2025. For other creatives, he's produced and engineered music, designed album artwork, and provided artistic direction. He also worships God amongst various musicians at religious gatherings and youth retreats.
Previous collaborations include The Declining Winter, Hail Your Highness, Vanilla, Sol Invicto (featuring Stephen Carpenter of Deftones), Ali Spagnola, Jake Bernstein of Beauty Slap, and a robotic cooking pot. He recently performed at Audiofeed Music Festival, NoCo Fest, and Hills n Hollars Music Expo. He has shared the stage with Andy Squyres, The Composure, The Dudley Corporation, and Josh Epstein of JR JR. In 2016, Steve reinterpreted Nils Frahm's neoclassical piano as prog rock by composing, performing, and recording new instrumentation atop three of Frahm's recorded pieces. Steve's 2013 album Tempo set spiritual poetry to a fury of dirty guitars, polyrhythmic hip-hop, and spectral, lo-fi melodies. It explores God's love for man and man's apathy towards God.
Steve and his wife host concerts in their home. Steve also makes the internet pretty as a professional web developer. Dell Technologies employs him as a software engineer. There he melds code and design with a passion for digital accessibility. Dell recently applied for a U.S. patent for an invention he coauthored. Steve also volunteers as the creative director for a local non-profit. Steve once worked at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a user interface developer. While there, he studied music technology, sound design, and creative writing. Before CMU, he studied multimedia and graphic design at Pittsburgh Technical College.
Steve's SoundCloud has collected tens of thousands of organic listens. Many publications have featured his work, including Obiryxoed, Joel Howard's Courage, The Oakland Review, and Ramen Music Magazine (defunct). In 2014, he won Best Website Design in the Independent Artist Network for the Music Arts (IANMA) Awards. In 2006, Detroit's Galactic Dust Records published his first album, an avant-garde techno collage.