Riccardo Nova was born in Milan in 1960 and seems always to have led an adventurous life, so that his story is enveloped in a veil of mystery. He was a lorry driver in the southern United States and later lived in Belgium, Italy, India and China. His career as a composer started, not especially sensationally, in the early nineties. His first work was the somewhat esoteric Sequentia Super Sex Nova Organa, a series of swirling and affected ‘magical canons’ inspired by Renaissance music and recorded on the Stradivarius label.