My recent acquisition of a fidget spinner to help my anxiety has recently gotten me obsessed with such purposefully ‘useless’ commodity items. With all of their elaborate buttons, knobs, and mechanisms, they’re saturated in gimmicks of tactility; seemingly oozing a desire to be touched. In Our Aesthetic Categories, literary theorist Sianne Ngai finds that the somewhat sadomasochistic enfetishment of the commodity item is what grants such items status as ‘cute’; their seeming infantility and helplessness causes us to impart upon them an inanimate want for mothering, one which we fulfill in the act of touch. In this piece, “a thing that splutters,” I explore a sound world not dissimilar to many of the sounds that such infantile commodity items make. Saturated in pops, squeaks, glitches, and hints of broken melody, this piece annoyingly circulates around gimmicky micro-variations of the same material as its metaphorical ‘buttons,’ ‘squeakers,’ and ‘mechanisms’ are activated. Like a dog’s chew-toy being obsessively pulverized, the piece gradually runs out of energy through its duration until the initially lighthearted, delightful sounds full of life and rhythm at the beginning become only a fading specter of themselves by the end.