So, Ableton put together this video of one of my favorite bands, Battles, on how they create music.
Battles uses all kinds of crazy loops and stuff to make their music. The accompanying blog article has a quote that kind of summarizes the weird sorts of things they are doing:
I like to get sort of funky with it by re-sampling the sample. You can send one audio loop, say, re-record it onto three tracks, into three clip slots, and then in those three clips slots you can play with the start point. I like to do this thing – and I've made a lot of loops using this technique – it's almost like beat-juggling as a DJ, but you're just doing the speaker on-off trick. So you're bouncing between the three loops – it's the exact same sample on all three tracks – and if the start points are slightly different you can get into some really cool dancing kind of rhythms. - Ian Williams
The Song Exploder episodes for Anamanaguchi, The Album Leaf, Baths and Tycho also talk about creating loops in music. All of this is pretty cool. Makes me want to get my act together again and finish building my drum machine.