Okay, I've burned about an hour trying to get this to work. I was able to side chain a compressor, sort of controlling one track with another, but the end result bears little resemblance to what I'm trying to do, it's totally imprecise.
So I think I'm going to back up here and make sure it's clear what effect I'm trying to produce. The chopped-out sections across this track make a pretty good example, I feel like this was done as much with Mute control as with sample compilations (I've heard stronger examples, really, but I can't find them at the moment). Does anyone know a typical way of achieving this? I hear it in a lot of electronic stuff.