The contrapuntal interactions you've described seem only normal for any "ensemble" group. Give me a group of people working together and I'll show you drama and teeth gnashing galore.

To use a string quartet, where harmony is the ultimate goal, and rip it apart with psychological malaise and destructive interaction is as if the musicians have taken Mozart and translated the music into Ligeti or the rumblings and dissonace of Schoenberg. And that is where true art appears.

I am in Los Angeles, but I'm so fascinated by the description of this piece that I'm flying up to Seattle to catch the last weekend. I hope many of your local readers hear the leitmotif in the North Western pines.