Bio

Danny Mulligan has always followed his interest in different forms of musical expression, using new instruments, new genres, or both at the same time. He began percussion at age 10, later becoming Homestead High School's winner of the 2007 Woody Herman Jazz Award. From age 11 to 18, he played drums in musicals and recorded home-made albums with punk and indie rock bands. Banging drums was cool, but Jimi Hendrix was cooler. So at age 14, he began teaching himself guitar, heavily inspired by Hendrix, Page, Clapton, and Petrucci. Guitar solos became an obsession that drove him to write and record his own music. And once his mom showed him Jesus screaming a G5 in Jesus Christ Superstar, he had to start singing too.

At UW-Madison, he joined the a cappella group, Fundamentally Sound. His arrangement of “I (Who Have Nothing)” won runner-up for the CARA: Best Male Collegiate Arrangement in 2013, while his arrangement of “Smooth Criminal” was featured on Best of College A Cappella 2013. He also studied classical guitar and earned a Bachelors of Science in music composition and psychology.

Danny played bass and guitar in the indie dance band, Trap Saturn. In 2016, Trap Saturn released their debut album, Duality, and won the Breakthrough Artist Award of the Year at the Madison Area Music Awards. During these years, Danny began building a home recording studio, learning how to mix, and writing the material that would become Archetype Asylum.

The name “Exodus to Infinity” began as a joke. One day as 16-year-olds in marching band, Danny and his friend Alex competed to see who could come up with a more epic album name than those of Coheed & Cambria. Danny shot out: “Caught in a Dark Vortex of Perpetual Motion on our Exodus to Infinity”, and it became a semi-ironic existentialist mantra for him and his comrades. The “Exodus to Infinity” part stuck and has come to symbolize humankind’s drive to transcend limitations on journeys towards perfect futures that can never be fully realized. Imagination always outruns reality, reality remains incomplete, and the endless journey is always the point.

In the end, the name (and the heart of this project) is utterly sincere and ironic at the same time, unabashedly embracing a dated Romantic heroism in one moment, pretending to be the fool who would dare to indulge such pretentions in the next. Which one is more real? Maybe there’s no way to know. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe not. You’ll have to listen to find out.