As hard as punk rock tried, it couldn't kill progressive rock. Just ask Greg Segal, the Portland, Oregon-based multi-instrumentalist from improvisational rock combos Paper Bag, Cold Sky and Dog Neutral. Modern home-recording technology and a bottomless reservoir of ideas allow him to indulge his inner Robert Fripp by turning out a fresh batch of instrumental art-rock every month. Now that the kids are starting to tire of punk's three-chords-and-a-scream template and are filling their iPods with the dense, layered work of The Mars Volta, Coheed & Cambria and The Secret Machines, the secret shame of Segal and like-minded bedroom musos everywhere may at last be ready for a public airing.

Throughout its history, prog developed some cripplingly bad habits -- interminably long songs, histrionic vocal turns and a propensity to lift lyrics out of the Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook. On Standard, Segal avoids these pitfalls by keeping his tracks short (the longest pieces here are still under five minutes) and ditching the singing entirely. Instead, he lets his guitar and tape loops do the talking. Segal uses his equipment to terraform harsh, future-tech soundscapes of metal and glass inhabited by monsters and giant robotic insects. It's a strangely cinematic place: menacing, shapeless things rattle and scrape past in the dark on "Solid State Life", chopped-up cymbals eerily punctuate "Living With the Expected", and a warped, atonal robot-guitar winds its way through the echoey "Robot Colosseum". The multi-part suites, Segal's lone concession to prog's wanky past, are particularly well-handled, reprising and reworking earlier ideas into interesting new configurations. Think Lark Tongues in Aspic, but played by androids.

The whole exercise can feel a little cold. The all-too-brief "Inner Ways" shimmers like a Bardo Pond track right before the crushing guitar noise comes in, and "Uniqueness Will Tell" is mournful and brilliantly fractured, but it's hard to feel emotionally invested in much of Standard. The problem isn't that Segal hasn't crafted emotive and evocative music -- it's that he pulls the plug on the tender stuff a little too soon. The production is often slicker than a greased hog in a raincoat and bristles with shiny guitars, snappy electric drums and straight-out-of-the-box effects, which gives the record the impression of having been assembled in a factory rather than crafted with care in a dark basement. Perhaps that's the point, but the stiffness is often stifling.