Third Uncle Violet: a pseudonym, a project, a blatantly-commercialized presentation of non-commercial work. Also, a way around having a rather boring name is real life. After spending the first five years of his life in a small, semi-legal cooperative in the Angeles National Forest in San Dimas, California, Daniel Shaw and his family moved to the college town of Claremont. It was here that he developed an interest in music, visual art, and theatre. He is interested in exploring what he sees as the overlooked emotional and contextual possibilities of early 1980's-era ambient music while blurring the lines between music and sound art. Shaw is also interested in playing with - in a purely experimental way - the possibilities of live improvisations using found sound clips and live talk radio. Shaw is currently studying Electro-Acoustic Music Composition with Dr. Joseph Martin Waters at San Diego State University and composing music and ambient soundscapes for Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice, directed by CJ Keith for the SDSU's School of Theatre, Television, and Film, opening in March, 2011. He performed two structured improvisational works on Kaoss Pad in December, 2010 as part of SDSU's Mixed Ensemble, advised by Dr. Karen Follingstad. In Summer of 2010, he digitally released his first album, Absence, under his pseudonym, Third Uncle Violet. He also wrote and performed the music and and collaborated on sound design for the video game demo, Tenth Planet. He is also a producer and contributor to a collaborative, expanding composition project with almost a dozen other composers with the working description of “chain music.” As a visual artist, Shaw has worked with The Sam Maloof Foundation, Michael Rathbun, Mitchell Syrop, Deborah Lefkowitz, and Roger Tilton and his large-scale photo installation, Aversion to Nomenclature, was displayed in The Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art. He shot and directed a series of exhibit documentaries for the Wignall, and curated a “Surrealist Film Festival” for their exhibit, Dreamscapes. In theatre, he co-wrote the multi-media sketch comedy musical, Krewlty 2 Animulz and wrote the song Suzie Surething for “Puppets After Dark” with Eli Bolin. Shaw also directed productions of The Zoo Story and The Bad Seed and has played major roles in several plays and musicals. In addition to his creative work, Shaw wrote a regular political column for three years at Chaffey College's newspaper, The Breeze, for which he won several awards at state Journalism Association of Community Colleges conventions. He graduated from Chaffey College with Associate's Degrees in General Education and Arts & Sciences. <a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Third+Uncle+Violet">Read more on Last.fm</a>. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.