Experimental Idea

[meio]

Hey guys,
I'm wondering if anyone knows of a tool that exists that does this:

I'd like to slice really tiny slivers of audio from a huge array of different samples and and stitch them together to create longer blocks of something new.
By tiny I mean, milliseconds to half a second range approx. I was thinking I'd do a crude manual edit in Live's arrange window to start but am at work at the moment and can't do anything until I finish so I thought i'd pester you guys instead.

I also thought I could create a Reaktor instrument which has a hundred samples looping continually and a gate which randomly switches between each samples' output at very short intervals.

Also, I remember reading somewhere a while ago about dudes who experimented back in the day by taking the attack of one sample and replacing it with other's attack. ANyone know of any music that employs these techniques explicitly? I'm thinking that probably sounds kind of stupid given the ubiquity of the sampler and layering techniques these days. But my understanding is that a lot of sound design is vertical and less horizontal?
Meio

[beatpoet]

Use a tracker

http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=111471

[polemans]

http://www.essl.at/works/replay.html

not exactly what you want to do but very similar.